London Gazette Research Articles

Before political economy: debate over grain markets, dearth and pauperism in England, 1794–96

ABSTRACT During the 1790s Britain experienced a series of poor harvests which, given an expanding population and wartime disruption to the European grain trade, caused sudden and rapid increases in the domestic price of wheat. In modern discussion of Corn and Poor Laws the severity of these fluctuations has been obscured by the use of annual average grain prices, despite weekly county prices being available from 1771 as published in the London Gazette. We highlight the uncertainties of grain prices during the period 1794-96, drawing upon contemporary discussion published in the Annals of Agriculture of the problems arising from fluctuations in the price of wheat. Our purpose is to demonstrate that the tropes usually today associated with the Corn and Poor Laws – pauperism, a clash between merchant, manufacturing and landlord interests, population and impoverishment – are absent from discussion during this period. A doctrinaire “political economy” would develop in the early 1800s, but did not yet exist. Policy argument drew upon casuistic reasoning from circumstance and past experience. We also show in conclusion that Edmund Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity cannot be linked to “political economy”.

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

Spitsbergen Through The Times

British mining and exploration companies were active in Spitsbergen, today Svalbard, between 1904 and 1953. This period was marked by events like the First World War and the signing of the Spitsbergen Treaty, some say Svalbard Treaty, and was therefore politically charged. This article investigates the British Arctic enterprise as portrayed in an influential newspaper, the London Times, where a diverse range of items appeared across the sections Advertising, Business, News, Editorials, and Letters to the Editor. Reports of the London Stock Exchange and the London Gazette serve as factual counterweights to potentially subjective media coverage. In four distinct phases, we see the archipelago’s emergence in global politics, post-war optimism until the settlement of all claim disputes in 1927, a quiet phase caused by global economic depression, and renewed but short-lived optimism after the Second World War. The paper concludes that the British Government took a stance in the Spitsbergen Question already in 1907, and the Times could not be instrumentalised to change this official political opinion. The study offers a baseline for new and comparative research using similar historical sources.

Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres by Rachael Scarborough King

Reviewed by: Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres by Rachael Scarborough King Hilary Havens Rachael Scarborough King, Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 272; 6 halftones, 3 maps. $44.95 cloth. The past few decades have produced a number of studies on interactions between manuscript and print during the long eighteenth century that overturn long-held notions of print’s preeminence. Margaret J. M. Ezell’s Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999) and David McKitterick’s Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (2003) are two of the earliest studies to observe that the emergence of print was “less a revolution than an accommodation . . . partly defined by the employment of older techniques having their roots in the manuscript tradition.”1 Betty A. Schellenberg’s more recent Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print in England, 1740–1790 (2016) focuses on late eighteenth-century manuscript exchanging coteries, arguing that they “bridged” the gap between scribal and print cultures, which “collaborated or came into conflict” and used forms “adapted from manuscript practice to serve the ends of the print medium.”2 Some of these studies, particularly Eve Tavor Bannet’s The Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (2005) and Clare Brant’s Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006), focalize manuscript and print interactions through letter manuals and the letter form itself, demonstrating not only that the epistolary form held central importance for multiple genres, but also the continuing interaction between print and manuscript through the end of the long eighteenth century.3 One of the newest contributions to this conversation on manuscript, print, and epistolarity in the eighteenth century is Rachael Scarborough King’s lucid and engaging Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres, though King does not clearly situate her book among previous studies on manuscript and print until the concluding “bibliographical essay.” King’s main contribution is her conceptualization of the “bridge genre,” “a genre that facilitates change by providing writers and readers with paths across shifting media landscapes” (2), to [End Page 401] illustrate how the letter not only served as a transition from manuscript to print during the long eighteenth century, but also aided in the formation of several new genres—newspapers, periodicals, biographical “lives,” and novels—concurrent with the expansion of postal and communication networks, print publications, and literacy. The book is divided into five chapters that focus on these four new genres (two of them on the novel) and related interactions between manuscript and print. Chapter one discusses the London Gazette, the only English newspaper from 1666 to 1678 and the primary one until 1695, to demonstrate how “written and printed media worked in tandem and in addition to the traditional oral circulation of news” (25). While examples from other newspapers that extended into the mid-eighteenth century would have broadened King’s argument, her claim that the London Gazette—and thus the newspaper as a genre—took its structure from the letter form is completely convincing: “from the sense of an ongoing, unfolding exchange with no determinate ending, the need to traverse space and time to deliver information, the formatting of news into short and separate items, and the conceit of a particular reader or community of readers to whom the writing is pertinent” (38). Specific examples—such as how manuscript newsletters persisted in the time of printed news and were bundled together through the mail, and how newspaper articles were essentially letters divested of epistolary markers—bolster King’s case for the epistolary origins of newspapers. King’s other two chapters on non-novel genres contain similar revela-tory finds. Chapter two discusses the function of letters in three periodicals: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, Daniel Defoe’s Review, and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator. King contends that as with newspapers, letters served as the structural model of the earliest periodicals, though as the genre developed, there was a shift from authentic to fictionalized letters while editors assumed more expansive roles. Dunton’s Athenian Mercury was made up...

База данных “Россия в западноевропейской прессе XVIII века”

This paper presents the results of an educational and research project entitled “Russia in the Western European Press of the Eighteenth Century.” Between 2016 and 2020 students from The Higher School of Economics University in Moscow translated texts of eighteenth-century Western European periodicals related to Russia. In the first part, the authors describe how this work was organized and outline the manner in which the translations are presented on the project website. The second part provides a case study of some news sent by a correspondent in St. Petersburg to The London Gazette in 1714 and 1715. The authors argue that in this period the information received by The London Gazette from St. Petersburg was very close to the dispatches sent to the Secretary of State for the Northern Department by George Mackenzie, the official British resident in the new Russian capital. Although Mackenzie probably did not write to The London Gazette himself, he was apparently involved in the communications, since most of the Russian news was published during the time when the resident was in St. Petersburg. The same correlation between the publication of news received directly from Russia and the period when British diplomats were in residence in Moscow or St. Petersburg can be traced to at least the years between 1709 and 1728. The fact that the above-mentioned example from The London Gazette came to the authors’ attention when it was being edited for publication in “Russia in the Western European Press of the Eighteenth Century” gives hope that other news items included in the online project will become a starting point for more scholars of eighteenth-century Russia.

TheGazette, theTatler, and the Making of the Periodical Essay: Form and Genre in Eighteenth-Century News

The<i>Gazette</i>, the<i>Tatler</i>, and the Making of the Periodical Essay: Form and Genre in Eighteenth-Century News

The European News Network in 1784

This article includes a comparative analysis of eight of the most important newspapers published in eighteenth-century Europe: the London Gazette, the Gazette de France, the Gaceta de Madrid, the Gazeta de Lisboa, the Gazette de Amsterdam, the Gazette de Leyde, the Gazette de Cologne and the Morning Chronicle. It surveys the contents of the 550 issues and more than eleven thousand articles published by these eight newspapers from January to June 1784. This analysis reveals patterns in the contents of each periodical and what kinds of news it was likely to publish, as well as the interconnections between these newspapers and how they exchanged information. It also demonstrates the spatial elements of news, showing the speed at which information moved in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne. Joseph Hone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi+209.

<i>Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne</i>. Joseph Hone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi+209.

The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and <i>The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature</i>

‘The Most Universal Intelligencers’

This article examines for the first time the accounts for the newspaper the London Gazette from May 1695 to February 1697. These accounts show that the Gazette’s circulation in this period was spectacular. I argue that this does not simply represent the triumph of print; the Gazette was produced and consumed within the wider context of the exchange and evaluation of manuscript and oral news. Moreover, the Gazette does not easily fit the categories employed in some current scholarly debates about seventeenth-century print culture. It was read as much for its foreign political news as for its domestic announcements, it had an afterlife as a journal of record and although profitable in this period it was not simply a commercial enterprise. Furthermore, it had various companion publications: a French translation and various occasional sheets. In many and diverse ways the London Gazette was ‘the most universal Intelligencers’.

Before Alternative Voices: &lt;em&gt;The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser&lt;/em&gt;

Before Alternative Voices: &lt;em&gt;The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser&lt;/em&gt;

Aphra Behn, Captivity, and Emperor of the Moon

Aphra Behn, Captivity, and Emperor of the Moon Catherine Ingrassia Click for larger view View full resolution The London Gazette, No. 1338, September 12-16, 1678 The September 12, 1678 issue of The London Gazette features an advertisement for an enslaved youth who has run away from his master after "the first instant." Detailing the twelve-year old male's distinguishing characteristics, the notice captures the markings of the domestic and the global as displayed on the young boy's body. He wears a "gray cloth Livery," "the Lace mixed with black, white, and orange colors." It was fashionable among London elite to have enslaved Africans as servants, and "young black males of the period" were particularly "prized for their youth." The twelve-year old's livery likely marks his labor as a footman or personal attendant. The livery's condition, "somewhat torn," might [End Page 53] suggest its intense use or a moment of violence upon the clothing or the youth himself. The uniformity of the livery sits perhaps uneasily with the child's more exotic details like the "Silver Ring in one of his ears." His hair "newly clipped very close" could indicate that, in accordance with the style of the time, a wig is part of his required attire; or, perhaps, as contemporaneous paintings suggest, the closely cut hair was the preferred style for enslaved young boys. His polylingual skills, for he "speaks some English, Dutch, and Blacks," echo the languages circulating in the Surinam of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). While distinguishing the two languages of the dominant colonial powers, English and Dutch, the description erases the complexity of multiple African languages, conflating them simply as "Blacks." The youth's very name, "Africa," summons a place at once partner in and subject to English imperial power. The reward for the youth's recovery can be made at James Street in Covent Garden, just blocks from where Behn's Sir Patient Fancy had debuted at the Dorset Theatre a few months before. For a seventeenth-century reader, this listing would have been unremarkable. Such advertisements, widely found in London newspapers, reveal that attempts at escape by the enslaved (or, in fact, English subjects apprenticed, indentured, or pressed into military service) frequently occurred within London's urban space, which offered the opportunity for concealment, disguise, and reinvention. It also suggests that enslavement, like other forms of captivity, had been somewhat normalized; Behn did not have to go to Surinam to encounter enslaved Africans. "People of African descent were part of the rural and urban landscape of late Stuart England," writes Susan Amussen. "[T]hey were highly visible in London, Bristol, and other ports and present in smaller numbers through the rest of the country." For the twenty-first century reader, however, such a notice signals something more complicated about the culture in which Aphra Behn lived: a culture regularly marked by the intersection of the imperial and the domestic, the foreign and the familiar. Scholars have long relied on Oroonoko (1688) to understand Behn's response to colonial practices in the West Indies, the dominant site of England's imperial presence throughout the Restoration. Behn spent time in the then-English colony of Surinam between summer 1663 and February 1664, providing her with the material for that well-known prose fiction. Behn's formative experience in Surinam, however, shaped a much wider constellation of her texts than Oroonoko. Among these we might include Emperor of the Moon, which similarly represents English practices of colonialism, human commodification, and captivity. Situated within a culture brimming with domestic manifestations of colonial power, Emperor of the Moon reveals the degree to which Behn's experience as what she termed an "American" informed her understanding of fundamentally asymmetrical relationships between imperial power and the colonial subject. Emperor of the Moon suggests the degree to which Behn perceived those same power dynamics structuring English culture as well. Behn lived in a world shaped by daily evidence of the financial and imaginative investment in England's increasing dominance in the British Atlantic. Behn witnessed English imperial expansion that accelerated dramatically with increasing control over the trade of enslaved people in the British Atlantic and the...

From Pantomime to Poetry: Wordsworth, Byron, and Harlequin Read Waterloo

JEFFREY N. COX From Pantomime to Poetry: Wordsworth, Byron, and Harlequin Read Waterloo W ELLINGTON ISSUED HIS OFFICIAL REPORT ON THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO on June 19, 1815; it arrived in London on June 21 and was published as a London Gazette Extraordinary the following day. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter and friend to Keats, heard the news from a messenger for the Foreign Office on the night ofthe 21st, as he was leaving the house ofJohn Scott, editor ofthe weekly Champion, to whom he returned to cel­ ebrate the news. Haydon wrote in his diary on June 25 ofthe impact ofthe Gazette on himself and another editor-friend: Read the Gazette again; I know it now actually by heart. Dined with Leigh Hunt. I give myself credit for not worrying him to Death at the news. He was quiet for some time, but knowing it must come by & by, so putting on an air of indifference, “Terrible Battle this, Haydon.” “A glorious one, Hunt.” “Oh, certainly.” To it we went.1 This anecdote suggests some of the division within the response of the British intelligentsia to the news of Napoleon’s defeat. On the one hand, Wordsworth and Southey danced around a bonfire on Skiddaw singing “God Save the King” and eating the standard British roast beef and plum pudding.2 On the other hand, Hazlitt, who viewed Napoleon’s loss as “the utter extinction of human liberty from the earth,” was extremely dis­ traught, with Thomas Noon Talfourd finding him “staggering under the blow of Waterloo . . . as if he had sustained a personal wrong” and with Haydon describing him as “prostrated in mind and body, he walked about unwashed, unshaved, hardly sober by day, and always intoxicated by night, literally, without exaggeration, for weeks.”3 1. The Diary ofBenjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-1963), 1:458. 2. Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1995), 153. 3. Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press, SiR, 56 (Fall 2017) 321 322 JEFFREY N. COX The public response was, of course, celebratory if rather muted. On June 23, there were illuminations in London, which the Times of the 24th praised as “brilliant” but without “novelty”; “the names of WELLING­ TON and BLUCHER shone side by side with magnificence of light,” but “We noticed but few transparencies.”4 By June 26, the Times was calling for a national day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God, a fund for Waterloo widows and orphans, and a triumphal arch, made up of the cannons seized at Waterloo and surmounted by an equestrian statue of Wellington as the “Great Conqueror,” perhaps at the entrance to Hyde Park.3 Already on June 29, there was a meeting ofthe Merchants, Bankers, and Traders of the City of London at the City of London tavern to propose a relieffund. The day of Thanksgiving would, of course, eventually occur on January 18, 1816. It would be 1846 before a statue of Wellington was placed on an arch, not made ofcannons and at Green’s Park, and by that time, the statue would raise a controversy.6 What is perhaps surprising is that the Allies’ decisive victory did not prompt the kind of celebrations in London that followed Napoleon’s abdi­ cation in 1814.7 Then, elaborate festivities greeted the arrival of the various European leaders; Green’s, St. James’s, and Hyde Parks were all given over to fireworks, fair-like festivities, and military reenactments; and huge par­ ties were thrown, including a masquerade held in Wellington’s honor at Burlington House on July 1 by Watier’s club, of which Byron was a mem­ ber. Those earlier celebrations were perhaps still too fresh in the public’s mind or, more likely, the incredible death toll of Waterloo made such en­ tertainments seem frivolous. Still, there were many sermons preached on Waterloo and particularly its widows and orphans, there were many po­ ems published within a year of the battle—at least thirty two, according to Simon Bainbridge, and perhaps a hundred or so if we include periodical 2008), 179—80. Quotations...

G243 Dr isaac henry gosset (1907–1965) founder of northamptonshire paediatrics

Dr Isaac Henry Gosset was the first consultant paediatrician for Northampton.His Northamptonshire responsibilities included both general and neonatal care also included hospitals in North Oxfordshire. As a boy he had great gifts as an engineer, reportedly making his own television. Having trained in Oxford and St Thomas’ London, he initially tried general practice before starting in paediatrics. After serving in the RAF, he did a further year of postgraduate training at Great Ormond Street Hospital before being appointed to Northampton General Hospital in 1947 In neonatal practice he designed the ‘Gosset icterometer,’ made of perspex allowing an accurate estimation of serum bilirubin without requiring a blood test. 4 Icterometers, although at that time an important advance, and used for many years afterwards, have been superseded and are no longer supported by current NICE guidelines 5 He died of a coronary thrombosis aged only 57 Shortly before his death, he designed the neonatal unit at Northampton. In this he was a generation ahead of his time which even in the 1970’s saw such units as being restricted to teaching centres. 6 The Gosset Neonatal unit is named after him and working to this day. On the 50 th anniversary of his untimely death, we his consultant successors in Northampton dedicate this presentation to his life and memory. References Isaac Henry Gosset Munk’s Roll Royal College of Physicians http://munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk/Biography/Details/1835 accessed November 13th 2014. Obituary. Brit Med J . 1965; 1 :867–8 The London Gazette 4th October 1940, Commissioned as a flight lieutenant in the RAF Medical Branch military number 84831 https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/34960/page/5840/data.pdf accessed November 21st 2014 Gosset IH. A Perspex Icterometer for neonates. Lancet 1960;275(7115):87–88 Neonatal Jaundice. NICE clinical guideline 98 National Institute for Heath and Care Excellence May 2010, p 10 Court D, Jackson A. Paediatrics in the seventies. Developing the Child Health Services . Oxford University Press; 1972, pp. 45–46

Wordsworth and the "Great Terror" of 1803-05

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth and the "Great Terror" of 1803-05Richard MatlakRichard Matlak Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 1Winter 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888099 Views: 19Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Tom of Bedlam.

Tom of Bedlam.

John Newbery's An easy introduction to the English language (1745): audience, origin and the question of authorship

AbstractAn Easy Introduction to the English Language (1745) is the grammar in the Circle of the Sciences series, a children's encyclopaedia published by John Newbery. The volumes in the Circle series were established reading material for boys and girls in Georgian England, and the grammar targeted a broad audience of children, young men and women and non‐native speakers. A comparison between James Greenwood's (1711) and (1737) popular works shows that the Circle grammar was largely plagiarised from Greenwood's grammars. The grammar is generally attributed to Newbery, but an advertisement in the London Gazette links the Circle series to author and playwright Eliza Haywood.

Further Light on Ogilby and Morgan's Map of London (1676)

In the London Gazette of 12 October 1676 an advertisement by William Morgan, John Ogilby's step-grandson and successor, assured subscribers that ‘the large map of London’ had been completed and wou...

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: the English Corn Returns as a data source in economic history, 1770-1914

From 1770 to 1914, the British Government collected weekly price and quantity data for all types of grain traded in many market towns; these 'Corn Returns' were published in the London Gazette. We computerized the data published between 1770 and 1864, totalling around 6 million data points. Here we describe the nature of these data; discuss why, when, and how they were collected; consider their accuracy and biases; describe how we computerized them; and offer caveats in using these—and similar—data. We highlight the problem of drawing valid inferences in the face of price impact from fluctuating grain quality and rising imports. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth: The English Corn Returns as a Data Source in Economic History, 1770-1914

From 1770 to 1914, the British Government collected weekly price and quantity data for all types of grain traded in many market towns; these ‘Corn Returns’ were published in the London Gazette. We computerised the data published 1770-1864, totalling around 6 million data points. Here we describe the nature of these data; discuss why, when and how they were collected; consider their accuracy and biases; describe how we computerised them; and offer caveats in using these – and similar – data. We highlight the problem of drawing valid inferences in the face of price impact from fluctuating grain quality and rising imports.