Professional Gentlemen Research Articles

Chatterton's Precious Things

If Thomas Chatterton had been born to Generation Alpha, my children’s generation, he would have been one of those obnoxiously attention-hungry, fashionable, razor-sharp social-media influencers. Self-promotion drove Chatterton. Precocious and sensitive, he used whatever literary and visual tropes seemed most popular to his inexperienced, but culturally acute eyes. His poetics was gorgeously fashionable and fraudulent, an inchoate grab at whatever professional relationships or commercial opportunities were likely to enhance his literary and pecuniary standing, and his success. More than anything, he wished to demonstrate his skills as a professional gentleman of letters, to those he perceived as his coterie circle of peers, patrons and publishers.
 The material experiment that Chatterton is best known for still is the Rowley manuscripts, and their often-repeated story of antiquarian fraudulence and forgery. But when I began researching Chatterton’s poetry and other textual forms, I discovered that his interest in the material was not only some kind of ill-informed, adolescent, historical conmanship; instead, it was a broad-based, ambitious and purposeful attempt to harness the power of material things for his own professional advantage. That said, in this paper I do use the Rowley manuscripts as a case study, because they are the most well-developed and frankly entertaining of Chatterton’s precious things.

From IB74 to US Patent 4438616: The (re)making of a profession

In 1971, John Maxwell Freeland, an Australian architectural historian, published 'The Making of a Profession: A History of Growth and Work of the Architectural Institutes in Australia'. Commissioned by the Council of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Freeland’s book detailed the history of the architecture profession in the country from British settlement to 1970, which he summarized as follows: From the grudging hands of unwilling convicts Australia’s building passed to opportunistic but unlettered craftsmen, thence to ambitious trades-contractor-architects and eventually to the smooth hands of the professional gentlemen. The gentleman-architect became the artist-architect, who in turn became, in response to bewildering imperatives in a rapidly changing word, the technologist-businessman-architect. And much of the colour and the fun and the adventure was squeezed out of architecture as it became a serious business. Freeland’s ‘technologist-businessman-architect’ is a figure that by the 1970s had appeared in many places across the globe. By then, as economics, management and scientific methods had gained currency, the personal service of an individual architect had become the corporate service of an architectural firm, while the practice of architecture had become less a profession and more and more a business. Furthermore, from the 1970s, to counter the ravages of developers and package-dealers, architects and architectural firms also increasingly widened the range of the services that they offered. Many began working with developers, while others became developers themselves, or ventured into the building industry. In addition to expanding their professional services, some also expanded their geographic scope, and became global entrepreneurs. Although today, this narrative is well-known, little scholarship exists that examines precisely how such changes occurred on the ground – certainly in Australia. Freeland’s history of the architecture profession concludes in 1970, and while several publications have appeared that document the country’s architecture post-1970, these focus predominantly on its aesthetics rather than its professional mechanics. This paper seeks to take a first step towards addressing this dearth by examining the career and work of Edwin Codd (1939-), an Australian architect, educator, businessman and global entrepreneur, who saw it as his mission to transform the way in which architecture was taught, procured and produced. Commencing in the late 1960s and extending to the early 2000s, Codd’s career paralleled and propelled the aforementioned changes in the profession of architecture in Australia, from technologist-businessman-architect to global entrepreneur. The paper draws on interviews with Codd and his (former) collaborators, and on archival research and a literature review of contemporary periodicals. These primary sources have been complemented with a reading of secondary sources on the history of architecture in Australia following the 1960s.

Olin B. Vaughan, 1920-2017

Olin B. Vaughan, 1920-2017

Stevenson in the Third Republic: Fiction and Liberalization

Stevenson in the Third Republic: Fiction and Liberalization Robert P. Irvine (bio) This essay analyzes the relation between literary fiction and its historical context in the case of two short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Providence and the Guitar” (1878) and “The Treasure of Franchard” (1883). The immediate historical context in which I will situate these texts is the emergence of the third French Republic in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the Paris Commune. Stevenson’s non-fiction accounts of his experiences in 1870s France in An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey (1879) will provide a vital link between history and fiction, but my purpose is not to read any of these texts for their biographical content. Rather, I aim to trace the political effects that accompany Stevenson’s increasingly confident subordination of his historical materials to the demands of aesthetic form. We can understand Stevenson’s choice of the short story, rather than the historical novel in the mode of Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, or Leo Tolstoy, in the light of Regenia Gagnier’s suggestion that “the rise of, and high demand for, the modern short story in the 1880s had something to do with the failure of the organic, panoramic view of the ‘realist’ novel to incorporate a world disintegrating into class and gender perspectives” (Subjectivities 124). For mutually incomprehensible class perspectives are exactly what we will find in “The Treasure of Franchard,” in which the professional gentleman and the vagrant boy are reconciled, not at the level of consciousness, by one learning at last to appreciate the values adhered to by the other (as typically happens in the historical novel), but at the level of agency, by the actions of one providing the material salvation of the other through the compact mechanism of the plot. The politics at stake in Stevenson’s formal strategies are liberal politics, and this essay will try to connect two stories that can be told about the category “liberal” in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, literary critics commonly identify a specifically liberal type of subjectivity established as a norm in a variety of written genres, including the novel, autobiography, and art criticism. In such genres, the liberal subject valorizes its own mental life, and reflects critically on that life, in ways that are conducive both to the cultivation of its own many-sided personality and openness to experience, and to a corresponding critical detachment or distance from the particular society in which it finds itself. [End Page 125] This self-conception can, of course, be understood as a mystification of “bourgeois individualism” (Gagnier, Subjectivities 169) and thus as a naturalization of the economic individualism of nineteenth-century capitalism. However, recent critics have also reasserted the socially critical potential of the liberal subject by tracing its continuation in the aesthetic doctrines of the last three decades of the century. In The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (1996), Linda Dowling argues against seeing the “Aesthetic Movement” of Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde as a “flight from politics” (1), incorporating as it does the essentially liberal ideals of disinterestedness and judging for oneself; Regenia Gagnier distinguishes the “liberatory aesthetics” of the last three from the anti-politics of “Decadence” (Gagnier, “Critique” 270, 271). Two more recent works, by Amanda Anderson and David Wayne Thomas, further explore the continuities between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism. Both do so by reassessing mid-century liberalism as a regulatory ideal of selfhood rather than an ideology—an aspiration to “detachment” (Anderson) or “many-sidedness” (Thomas) that remains implicit not only in the writing of Pater and Wilde but also in any critical thinking whatever, even that which in our own time attempts, from a Foucauldian or Marxist perspective, to demystify liberal values as the effects of power (Anderson 23–33; Thomas 14–25). On the other hand, social historians tell a different story about the “liberal” in the same period. Gareth Stedman Jones and Margot Finn, most notably, chronicle “liberalization”: not as a subjective stance but as a social process. “Liberalization” names the gradual...

Equal opportunities in the professions: a research agenda

The paper identifies gendered power relations as a key issue for research into equal opportunities in the professions. It brings research in history and sociology to bear on each other. It argues that from the early modern period particular hegemonic masculinities were institutionalized in the changing power relations of the State, universities and professions, from which women were marginalized as the teachers of the poor. Following a major restructuring of Church, State and university relations, women were admitted to the universities and professions in the late nineteenth century. While the route to professional gentleman through the public schools and universities was institutionalized by the First World War, the position of women changed little, with most graduate women studying in the Arts’ faculties and becoming teachers. The significance of a century of increasingly rapid growth in women's entry to the universities and professions and antidiscrimination legislation passed in the 1970s remains contentious. The example of the gendered oligarchy of the education professions shows that hegemonic masculinities are being remade in the 1990s to include women as teachers of younger children and support staff in secondary and higher education.

R D Gidney and W P J Millar, Professional gentlemen: the professions in nineteenth-century Ontario, Ontario Historical Studies series, University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. xv, 505, £39.00, $60.00 (hardback 0-8020-0619-1), £16.00, $24.00 (paperback 0-8020-7580-0).

R D Gidney and W P J Millar, Professional gentlemen: the professions in nineteenth-century Ontario, Ontario Historical Studies series, University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. xv, 505, £39.00, 24.00 (paperback 0-8020-7580-0). - Volume 40 Issue 2

Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario

What distinguishes professions from other occupations? How and why does the meaning of profession or professional work change over time? These are the questions that animate Professional Gentlemen, the first comprehensive account of the professions in nineteenth-century Ontario. Beginning with the three traditional 'learned professions, ' law, divinity, and medicine, Professional Gentlemen first examines their establishment in the Upper Canadian occupational order, and then explores the nature and rhythms of professional work, the education of professional men, and the effects of political, economic, and social change on their privileges and place in society. The authors turn next to the development of a number of occupations aspiring to professional status, ranging from dentists and surveyors to engineers, public school teachers, and others; some were successful - some failed. In the process, however, the very meaning of profession itself became more diffuse and the occupations it encompassed more diverse. Those interested in the history of a variety of specific occupations, in the emerging structure of white-collar work, in the history of higher education, and in changing gender relations will find this book compelling. But Professional Gentlemen is more than a history of a particular group of occupations. It is also an inquiry into the nature of a social and occupational ideal, its influence in nineteenth-century society, and the transmutations in the ideal which laid the groundwork for twentieth-century conceptions of professional work.

Complimentary

A numerous company of ladies and professional gentlemen assembled in the hall of the Royal College of Physicians, Queen Street, yesterday afternoon, on the occasion of the presentation of portraits of Dr. Clouston, subscribed for by friends in recognition of his long connection with the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the Insane. In the absence of Mr. Adam, Chairman of the Managing Board of the Asylum, Professor Rankine presided.

Average Doses in the Next Pharmacopeia.—A Protest.

Saguache, Colo., Oct. 20, 1900. To the Editor: —At the last convention for the revision of the U. S. pharmacopeia an instruction was given to the revision committee to insert the average dose of each article. This was stated by one of the leaders to be merely a concession to the demand by physicians that the forthcoming revision should result in a more practical manual for their use. In this spirit it was adopted without debate or alteration. Conversation since that time with many of the delegates to that convention, as well as with professional gentlemen from all sections of the country, convinces us that average doses are not wanted in this work by either physicians or pharmacists, as in many instances they must be a wholly indeterminate quantity, owing to the wide range of conditions that are to be met, and under no circumstances could they be more than

OPERATIONS FOR SECONDARY CATARACTS.

It is a safe assertion that at least one-third of all cataract extractions require a secondary operation to obtain satisfactory vision. What constitutes satisfactory vision must vary with the different needs of our patients. The uncultured laborer requires less than the educated professional gentleman or business man. The laborer with a vision of 20/70 is able to earn a living and read type as he would naturally choose, while the educated man of affairs would look for at least 20/40. Even with that amount I do not hesitate to do a secondary operation, provided the patient is willing to assume his share of the risk. When the vision is 20/70, or less, I suggest to the patient the advisability of an operation to improve the sight. We can divide the so-called secondary cataracts into two classes, the simple and the complicated form. The former consists of hyperplasia of the epithelial

THOUGHTS ON THE APPENDIX.

For the last decade the mind of the medical world has been turned to the region of the appendix, and possibly no part of the body has been so often before the profession for attention, both medical and surgical. The professional gentleman who has not had numerous cases of appendicitis to treat has either been careless in his diagnosis and investigations, or has had a clientele that is far behind in medical fads and fancies. The increased frequency of troubles that involve the appendix either primarily or secondarily, has caused much thought and many theories in regard to its treatment both medical and surgical, conservative and radical. Many learned men of wide experience have espoused the conservative course, but possibly a greater number favor prompt surgical interference. Quite a degree of success has been attained, and many are almost entitled to be called experts in its management, and if failure

The Spanish Language and the P.-A.M. Congress.

New York, Sept. 23, 1896. To the Editor: —Several physicians who think of attending the Second Pan-American Medical Congress, to be held in the city of Mexico, if they could secure the services of a well known Spanish speaking physician to act as their guide and general translator, have asked me whether I am willing to go with them in that capacity. I replied that I have no objections, but in order that the number of physicians composing the party be still larger will you be so kind as to say a few words about this matter in theJournal? There are, no doubt a large number of professional gentlemen who would willingly go to Mexico, taking advantage of the reduction of the price of the trip for that occasion, if they could find some confrere thoroughly qualified to act as their cicerone . I remain sincerely yours, 235 Thompson Street.

National Water-Supply Exhibition

HYDE PARK and Trafalgar Square experiences have very plainly shown that the simplest way to induce a clamorous populace to forget what they fancy they want, is to let them hold their meetings and pass resolutions. It is a matter of such very small exertion to hold up a hand in favour of a resolution compared with taking any personal trouble to see that any steps are taken towards carrying it into effect. Human nature is only in certain phases influenced by a man's occupation, and whether resolutions are passed by “labourers” or by “professional gentlemen,” they stand much the same chance of being forgotten after the press has recorded that they have been passed. Last year the Society of Arts in loyal response to the request of its Royal President, held a conference to discuss the water-supply question. After two days' work a resolution was carried urging that a small scientific commission should be appointed to collect information and suggest further inquiries on the subject. Twelve months elapsed and a few days ago another conference was held, when it was made known that the only step taken with regard to that resolution was that just before the Conference it had reached the Lords of the Treasury. Last year the Society directed that a résumé and sort of index should be made of what had been done by Parliamentary inquiries and official reports with regard to water-supplies, and the result was a volume called “Notes on Previous Inquiries,” which, though very incomplete, may serve as a basis for a larger and more comprehensive work. The very fact of the imperfections in these notes showed to those more immediately connected with their compilation the need of enlisting wider sympathies if anything of real value was to be printed. A letter in the Times of April 14 of this year mentioned that although the notes had been published for many months, “not a single word” had been sent in response to the request printed on the back of the title-page that suggestions or corrections should be sent to the secretary. The idea was then suggested of founding a permanent free museum for the purpose of keeping before the public mind those subjects, apart from the question of low rates only, which should be considered in arranging water-supplies. It was decided that a temporary exhibition should be first tried as an experiment and after some difficulties in finding it a locale, the management of the Royal Aquarium kindly arranged for the use of the south gallery for the purpose. This exhibition is now open and a handbook is issued. It is marked “under revision,” and on the title-page attention is appropriately drawn to the fact that it is the first public exhibition of the kind.