Samuel Smiles Research Articles

A lack of unity in terms of translation in <I>Saigoku-rissi-hen</I> translated by Masanao Nakamura

Saigoku-rissi-hen by Masanao Nakamura is one of the most famous translations of the Meiji era in Japan. Self-Help, the enlightening original, was written by Samuel Smiles. When Nakamura returned to Japan from England in 1868, he was given a copy of Self-Help by his British friend, H. Freeland. Self-Help was widely read in the 19th century in the West. At that time, Saigoku-rissi-hen and another example of an enlightment text, Gakumon-no-susume written by Yukichi Fukuzawa, were both million-seller books in the Meiji era in Japan.Comparing Saigoku-rissi-hen with the original Self-Help, we can observe many omissions and free translations. This is because Nakamura judged some contents unsuitable and others difficult to translate. This was an inevitable result of Japanese-to-English literary translation in Japan considering the basic level of cross-cultural and technical understanding prevalent at that time. From Saigoku-rissi-hen, we can understand Nakamura's painstaking efforts to achieve an accurate word-for-word translation.In his translation, Nakamura used many Japanese words for one English word; that is, his work shows a lack of unity in terms of translation. For example, he used two terms for “chemist” and three terms for “chemistry”. However, he never used “seimi (gaku)” which was a general term for “chemistry” in use at that time in Japan. Nakamura was originally a scholar of Chinese classics so he disliked the term “seimi (gaku)” which was a mere transliteration of the Dutch, “chemie”. As a scholar of Chinese classics, he probably wanted to set great value on the meaning of Kanji characters.In Saigoku-rissi-hen, we can find another example of a lack of unity. He used six terms for the word “school”. The modern school system started in 1872 in Japan and as a result Nakamura did not know what “school” was when he published his translation. He, therefore, used many different terms for “school” by exercising his imagination.Masanao Nakamura, one of the most famous Enlightment scholars in the Meiji era, tried ha ugh his translation of “chemistry” and “school”.

“Be what you would seem to be”: Samuel Smiles, Thomas Edward, and the Making of a Working-Class Scientific Hero

ArgumentThis paper examines the effort that was involved in sustaining the nineteenth-century middle-class ideological fabrication of the image of the working-class scientific autodidact. The construction and reception of Samuel Smiles’ biography of the Scottish cobbler and naturalist Thomas Edward provides a way to investigate this process in detail and to show how Smiles’ conception of the scientific persona related to the “politics of character” in mid-Victorian Britain. Edward’s own response to the biography offers an unusual opportunity to analyze the making of a Victorian scientific hero, who, in the process of being fitted to Smiles’ notion of a scientific persona, came to feel that he had been robbed of his life.

The Promotion of a Secular Work Ethic

The Promotion of a Secular Work Ethic

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING AN EARNEST IMPROVER: CLASS, CASTE, AND SELF-HELP IN MID-VICTORIAN ENGLAND

“THE NATION is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal improvement,” argued Samuel Smiles in his 1859 Self-Help, the work that codified the supremacy of aspiration over occupation as a marker of identity for thousands of readers on the ill-defined boundary of the lower-middle and upper-working classes (16; ch. 1).1 Smiles’s importance, then and now, lies not in his invention of “self-improvement” as a defining feature of this group, but rather in his skill at publicly expressing the complex set of ideals and values that had already been worked out in, and expressed by, small groups of improvers for at least two generations.

Samuel Smiles and the Woman Question in Early Victorian Britain

When Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) looked back over his career from the vantage point of old age he saw himself as one who had labored for “the emancipation and intellectual improvement of women.” His self-description will surprise those who know him, either through his famous book, Self-Help (1859), where women make fleeting appearances as maternal influences on the achievements of great men, or through the attempts that have been made during the Thatcher years to offer him as an exemplar of a highly selective code of “Victorian Values.” Nonetheless, there is much to be said for Smiles's interpretation: not only was he a prolific author on the condition of women, but his writings on this subject from the late 1830s to the early 1850s were radical in tone and content.By directing attention to these writings, this article makes three points about early Victorian gender relations, radicalism, and Smiles's own career. First, it challenges the lingering notion that this was a time when patriarchal values stifled debate on gender issues. For some historians who write about the women's movement, the early Victorian era has the status of something like a dark age in the history of the agitation for women's rights; this period is overshadowed on the one side by the great debates initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and on the other by the new feminist movements that developed after the 1850s. Barbara Caine, for example, has written recently that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was “absolute” in the mid-century years; few women had the financial resources necessary to set up a major journal even if they had been bold enough to do so, and the sort of man who wrote sympathetically about women was concerned primarily with his own needs.

Society Reified: Herbert Spencer and Political Theory in Early Meiji Japan

During the early Meiji period of the 1870s and 80s, Japanese leaders were in the process of constructing a new state. The old regime of the Tokugawa shogunate had been overthrown in 1867, and its “feudal” ways were to be replaced with institutions that valued another, “Western” set of priorities—including applied science and industrial capitalism, constitutional law and deliberative assemblies. This program of institutional change, called “civilization” or “enlightenment” by its proponents, enlisted a range of foreign consultants, from engineers and military officers to teachers and legal experts. Equally important were Western books, the translation of which had begun under the old regime. Among the works that made a powerful impression on Japanese readers at the start of the Meiji period were William and Robert Chambers' Political Economy, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help, and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. The “liberal” tradition defined by these authors provided an introduction for the works of Herbert Spencer. Although his reputation today most often places him among conservative or libertarian political philosophers, it was Spencer's liberal defense of natural rights that initially interested Japanese readers in the 1870s. For Spencer's appearance coincided with a growing advocacy of “people's rights” in Japan, as private citizens pressured the authoritarian oligarchy ruling Japan to grant them the rights to freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and to participation in governmental process through the institution of a national assembly.

“Every man for himself, and god for us all!” Mrs Oliphant, self-help, and industrial success literature in John Drayton and the melvilles

This article examines two of Oliphant's early novels, John Drayton; Being a History of the Early Life and Development of a Liverpool Engineer and The Melvilles in the context of other “industrial fiction” of the 1850s. The article also considers the impact of popular non-fiction, such as that produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and Samuel Smiles's best-sellers, such as Self-Help, on the fiction of the mid-century, and suggests that both fiction and non-fiction of the period use similar narrative conventions. The article then asks why Oliphant's Liverpool novels do not conform to an orthodox industrial narrative in which the humble working-class hero is extravagantly rewarded for his industry in the closing chapters. It is suggested that one possible reason for Oliphant's resistance to narrative orthodoxy was her own Scottish nonconformist religious upbringing and her early support of the theologian, Thomas Chalmers, a key figure in the Disruption of the Scottish Church of 1843. Chalmers, about whom Oliphant later wrote a sympathetic biography, fiercely opposed state intervention in social affairs and developed his own “local system” to alleviate the poverty and misery of areas of Glasgow. This article examines the ways in which Oliphant's intellectual debt to Chalmers, and her particularly Scottish ethical and religious background, prevented her from giving an easy assent to the prevailing rhetoric of social and industrial progress in metropolitan England in the 1850s. Oliphant's own reactions to other writers of industrial fiction, such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, are also briefly examined, and attention is given to the comparatively unconventional endings of her novels. The article concludes by arguing that Oliphant's political position is not as simple as it may at first appear, and that her fiction reveals a more complex and reflective attitude to industrialisation than has previously been recognised.

Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition

^D rwescribing the powerful force of domestic habit, Elizabeth Gaskell claimed that [t]he daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise. It is the novelist's task to chronicle [t]he traditions of [. . .] bygone times, even to the smallest social particular in order to enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances which contributed to the formation of (2). Whether delineating the constricting habits of social prejudice or the quaint details of domestic routines, Gaskell outlines a theory of habit as a guiding psychological mechanism of social structure that was shared widely by her contemporaries and debated extensively in nineteenth-century psychology. This philosophical dialogue on the function and implications of habitual behavior dated back to associationist philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume, David Hartley, and Dugald Stewart, and continued in later-nineteenth-century psychological writings by, among others, George Henry Lewes, John Stuart Mill,James Sully, G. F. Stout, William Carpenter, Henry Maudsley, Alexander Bain, and William James. Theories of habit made further appearances in nineteenth-century advice literature, and were discussed extensively in popular works such as Sarah Stickney Ellis's The Women of England (1838) and Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859), as well as in magazine articles, religious tracts, sanitary reports, treatises on character formation, and eccentric biographies of

George Fulford and Victorian Patent Medicine Men: Quack Mercenaries or Smilesian Entrepreneurs?

In the early twentieth century, a time when patent medicine men were stereotyped as evil and dishonest, G. T. Fulford of Brockville, Ontario made his fortune from an iron pill called Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People. Once successful, Fulford remained in Brockville where he served on the town council and gave generously to charities. In 1900 he was appointed by Laurier to the Senate. When he died in 1905 he was remembered as a kind and ethical man. His story, like that of several other prominent patent medicine men, conforms more with the ideals of Samuel Smiles than with the popular image of disrepute.

Varieties of Victorianism: the uses of a past

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Past and Present: The Case of Samuel Smiles's Self Help Gary Day Imperial Muscular Christianity: Thomas Hughes' Biography of David Livingstone Mary Angela Schwer Victorian Modernity? Writing the Great Exhibition Chris Hopkins Black Silk and Red Paisley: the Toxic Woman in Wilkie Collins' Armadale Jessica Maynard A Postmodern Victorian: Lewis Carroll and the Critique of Totalising Reason Simon Malpas Politics as Antagonism and Diversity: Mill and Lyotard Peter R. Sedgwick Victorian Values and Silas Marner K.M. Newton Racism in the Mid-Victorian Novel: Thackeray's Philip John Peck The Reason for Drinking in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge Steven Earnshaw 'To Whom Does He Address Himself?: Reading Wordsworth in Browning's Pauline Carl Plasa A Rose is a Rose is a Rover Alistair Walker 'Haven't I Seen You Somewhere Before?' Melodrama, Postmodernism and Victorian Culture Nadine Holdsworth 'A Low Borne Labourer Like You': Audience and Victorian Working-Class Melodrama Darryl Wadsworth Victorian Values and Fast Young Ladies: From Madeleine Smith to Ruth Rendall Nick Rance Vampires and Victorians: Count Dracula and the Return of the Repressive Hypothesis Robert Mighall Of Elephants and Men: The Freak as Victorian and Contemporary Spectacle Jonathan Skinner Index

Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values

Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values

Europe in the making of Japanese values

With the Meiji Restoration the first steps were taken in the third quarter of the 19th century to set up a national system of education in Japan. European educational theories were influential. Samuel Smiles became a reference for moral principles and Western heroes from Socrates to Florence Nightingale were exemplars. The articles explores the complex relationship of Western ideas with indigenous Japanese culture.

Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy, and Conspiracy in Victorian England by Colin A. Russell

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 155 single-word entry “portraits.” This specialized book is most likely to appeal to those historians of science who are interested in witnessing the technological genius ofan innovative mind atwork. It is unfortu­ nate, however, that Records ofthe Dawn ofPhotography does not repro­ duce any ofTalbot’s images (though the dustjacket does offer two), despite the fact that Schaaf’s own scholarship has successfully linked these notebooks to several extant examples ofTalbot’s photographic work. Unless already familiar with Talbot’s images, a reader would have little idea what Talbot’s photogenic drawings or calotypes look like, let alone be transported by their elegiac beauty. This decision— quite possibly a financial one beyond Schaaf’s control—seems to me a missed opportunity, since it is often through the visual experi­ ence of seeing the images that a modern reader chooses to seek more information about the images’ technological history. Nonethe­ less, this expertly annotated facsimile edition of Talbot’s notebooks provides an excellentwritten resource for historians of 19th-century science, especially those interested in the early years ofphotographic technology. Elspeth Brown Ms. Brown is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, currently researching the rela­ tionships among photography, the science of work, and modern consumer culture in the early 20th-century United States. Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy, and Conspiracy in Victorian England. By Colin A. Russell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xx+535; illustrations, figures, tables, notes, index. $100.00 (hardcover). The British chemist Edward Frankland (1825-99) was the illegiti­ mate son of a distinguished British lawyer, and he spent most of his career establishing legitimacy for himself and for his profession. Born into what were, ostensibly, humble circumstances (though per­ haps not those that Samuel Smiles would have admired), Frankland worked his way up to become the leading British chemist of Victo­ rian times and along the way, as Colin Russell makes clear in Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy and Conspiracy in Victorian England, amassed a considerable personal fortune (pp. 514-19). Following a period ofapprenticeship to a pharmacist in Lancaster, northwest England, Frankland traveled to London at the age of twenty-one, where in Lyon Playfair’s Museum of Economic Geology he began to pursue chemical analysis. He attended lectures in chem­ istry and became acquainted with many new applications of chemis­ try as well as with leading chemists, including Hermann Kolbe. This led to a research post in organic chemistry in Robert Bunsen’s Mar­ burg laboratory. It was in Marburg that Frankland met Sophie Fick, 156 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of impeccable pedigree, who later became his first wife. On re­ turning to England, Frankland taught at a Quaker school, where a fellow teacher wasJohn Tyndall. In 1848, they both left for Marburg to study for doctorates, after which Frankland moved on to Justus von Liebig’s laboratory in Giessen. Back in England, he made his way through a number ofinstitutions that all, in one way or another, served his ultimate purpose. Hejoined Owens College, Manchester, in 1851, and, because of the city’s industrial activities, became en­ gaged in highly lucrative work as a consultant and expert witness and in studies on atmospheric pollution. For the last few years of the East India Company’s existence he taught at its Addiscombe College, then moved on to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, the Royal Institution, and, in 1865, to the Royal College of Chemistry. Frankland contributed much to the theory of valency, to organic synthesis in general, and to what he named organometallic chemis­ try. He also transformed the teaching of chemistry, at the same time providing manufacturers and suppliers oflaboratory equipmentwith greatlyexpanded markets (and no doubt a substantialcommission for himself). It was an age when the practical application of science was synonymous with chemistry, and in which a man, especially a wily entrepreneur such as Frankland, could usefully indulge in a variety of its activities. Of course, there was a price to pay, as Frankland discovered when his money-making activities created problems with the X-Club, an exclusive dining club of influential (mainly London) scientists, and delayed his recognition by the Royal Society. For historians of technology...

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hardy's Poetry, or How They Brought the Bad News from Essex to Wessex

One of the most influential of recent efforts to take Hardy's strange poetic reputation in hand has been that of Donald Davie, himself a poet, who inThomas Hardy and British Poetrysaluted Hardy's “scientific humanism” and noted his poetic “engineering” as that of a poetically “self-made man.” Thus Davie re-made Hardy, creating a combination of a poetic Samuel Smiles and a poetic Isambard Kingdom Brunei conducting himself with technical assurance and brio — but with limited and “mechanical” poetic aims (13, 40). Perhaps it's the “visibly ideological” nature of Davie's performance here which makes it still so arresting, and “smaller and clearer as the years go by.” In a once-famous essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” T. S. Eliot complained (or at least explained) that the many writers about him re-made Shakespeare in their own images. Coleridge's “smack of Hamlet,” which read off a Hamlet invested with his own qualities as he construed them, perhaps also indicates how common this sort of thing may be.

Book Review: Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values

Book Review: Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values

The future of leisure: making leisure work

The general subject of this paper is the future of leisure. It is suggested that the existing forecasts over the last forty years regarding the future of leisure - either leisure's abundance or its scarcity - depend upon taking leisure and work either segmentally or even as polar opposites. It is argued that recovering a basic idea found in Samuel Smiles' book Self-Help (1859) could go a long way toward establishing an identity between real work and real leisure. Smiles is typically read as a mere lyric poet and as a writer in part responsible for projecting upon his people horrid centres of industrialism by way of promoting what is historically referred to as the Victorian work ethic. But Smiles can be read differently. In this paper it is argued that Smiles' interpretation of self-help is so inclusive as to be useful in understanding the nature and significance of the future of leisure if, that is, we take leisure to be work.

サミュエル・スマイルズにおける大衆観の形成

This paper was written down as a part of my historical work, in which I am planning to analyse, firstly, the outlook on the general public of Samuel Smiles (1812-1904), secondly, of Masanao Nakamura (1832-91).Smiles, a biographer in the Victorian era, wrote Self-Help, and, a translation into Japanese of which, titled Saigoku Risshihen, the Biographies of Western Self-Made Men by Nakamura, became a best seller in Japan. It was not only often used as a textbook at primary schools which were established in Japan at almost the same time, but also read by many children from former Samurai families, who had already lost their social status based on the feudalism.Saigoku Risshihen inspired and urged them to devote themselves to studying hard. However, the aim of their study was almost always to succeed in the entranceexamination to Tokyo University, the Faculty of Law of which was established mainlyto make the bureaucrats. It is called risshin-shusse shugi, or the principle for what iscalled the success of life.This is the direct origin of the overheated struggle for success in the entranceexaminations, one of the biggest educational problems in Japan today.And I thinkthat lots of winners learned to look down upon the general public without noticing, andthat it has been another big, but hidden problem of Japanese education.On the other hand, I think that Smiles did not look down upon the generalpublic at all, and that Nakamura learned not to do after reading Smiles'Self-Help, although he had tended to look down upon the general public strongly before the MeijiRestoration.And after all I would like to make the fact known that the ideas of thetwo were much loftier than risshin-shusse shugi.In this paper, I analysed Smiles'outlook on the general public in his youngdays when he lived in the burgh of Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland.Firstly, Iexamined his boyhood, and pointed out two main points:one is that he learned whatthe way of living without mentally bowing to any authorities is like, and the other isthat he knew obscure persons sometimes show brilliant talents.The former point was formed because he was a descendant of a Cameronian, a member of a group of radical Covenanters.Smiles himself was not interested inreligion at all, but he must have heard the stories of his ancestor's martyrdom.Thelatter point was formed because his family had a maid who was excellent at telling himtales.The name of the story was Guy Mannering, and after some years Smiles got toknow that it was a novel by Sir Walter Scott.Smiles was very much surprised toknow that the maid had remembered all of the story and had not ommited at all whentelling him the story.These two points above remained throughout his youthful days.On the otherhand, the atmosphere of his school was very uncomfortable because his teacher wastoo tyrannical.Smiles learned to hate the method to take strong measures in order tomake others bow.And working as an apprentice of a medical doctor afterwards, he found a lotof intellectual farmers in East Lothian.Many of them were well-educated at parishschools in rural areas.So Smiles learned that respectful characters were often made atgood schools.In this paper I introduced a report by one of His Majesty's Inspectors in1840's.I regret that even researchers in Japan often mistake that there were noinspectors in Britain in this age.Some of them have no idea that Scotland has had aquite different educational system from England.Indeed the system of parish schoolsin Scotland was originally made to conciliate Scottish people after the Forty-Five.Sothe duties of the inspectors included watching Scottish population.

Out of Wedlock: Perceptions of A Cumbrian Social Problem in the Victorian Context

THEPROBLEMOFTHEFALLENWOMAN, the hapless girl left pregnant by her lover, was one which exercised Victorian consciences, just as it was a familiar theme in the literature of the age. Only very occasionally, however, did it lead to agonized public discussion on the part of the churches. Such a discussion (which brought nationally resonant overtones with it) burst upon the Lake Counties, Cumberland andWestmorland, in the autumn of 1865, and then it did so largely by accident, through the naIvete or innocence of Cumberland's most famous philanthropist, George Moore. Moore, the subject of a Samuel Smiles biography, 1 had been absent from his native county· of Cumberland for much of his business career, and he distinguished himself by returning to his youthful haunts to pursue his Christian and philanthropic leanings. During that absence, which spanned much of the first half of the nineteenth century, he had not,. it would seem, followed the evidence for the development of consistently high and growing illegitimate birth ratios for the two Lake Counties. Accordingly, he was, by the middle sixties, correspondingly shocked and moved to protest at a trend which was familiar to every Lakeland parish priest, clerk, or officer. Moore had, of course, stumbled upon an exceedingly complex and intractable social problem, one which was not likely to respond to increased intensities of stark moralizing. But, always a man for positive action, he very properly proposed the collection of information and views on the subject of widespread Cumbrian illegitimacy. His strategy for eliciting this information unfortunately lacked judgement. Moore had been acting as chairman of a gathering of the Evangelical Union, held at the Queen's Hotel, Keswick, in mid-October 1865, and consisting largely of interested clergy. The chairman urged his audience to preach against bastardy, recommended that cases of it should be dealt. with behind closed doors (to minimize publicity), and advocated that hiring fairs and farm sleeping arrangements should alike be brought under greater moral control. We shall return to these institutions. Above all, he offered ten

Victorian Values: A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy by T.C. Smout (review)

REVIEWS T.C. Smout, ed., Victorian Values: A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 232. $53.95 CDN (cloth). Margaret Thatcher put Victorian studies in her debt when in a 1983 television interview she proclaimed herself a believer in Victorian values. Showing the entrepreneurial spirit which she so often called for, British Victorianists were quick to cash in on this valuable endorsement of their product. They quickly put together a series of symposia and books on the question of what exactly Victorian values were, of which this is the latest and perhaps the most distinguished example. The papers collected here were delivered in December, 1990, only a few weeks from Mrs. Thatcher's sudden fall from office. In recruiting Victorian England to her cause, Thatcher was being somewhat daring. As Victorianists, especially in North America, we may need to be reminded periodically that the word Victorian is more than just academic. It carries a high and largely negative charge in popular British usage, connoting exploitation, greed and hypocrisy. Neil Kinnock, the (then) rising hope of the Labour party, expressed this view when he responded to Mrs. Thatcher's declaration of allegiance with the statement that "Victorian England was a place where a few got rich and most got hell." Among the sources of this vision are Marx, Engels, Lytton Strachey and, above all, Charles Dickens. As Raphael Samuels reminds us in his excellent opening discussion of what Victorian values meant to Mrs. Thatcher, Dickensian is an even darker word than Victorian in common British parlance, redolent of dirt, destitution and disease, conjuring up the figures of Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim. A generally left-tilting demotic social history of Britain has tended to underwrite this vision, providing a complacently whiggish backdrop to the modern welfare state, which stands forth as a reproach to Victorian Britain's failure to meet the needs of an urban industrial society, and Reviews75 particularly of its working class. Needless to say, die Labour party has a considerable emotional and ideological investment in this scenario. Much academic social history, though hardly a right wing enterprise, has been trying for decades to erode it. A pioneer in die reassessment of Victorian Britain was Asa Briggs (a historian of die moderate left) whose The Age ofImprovement (1959) differed as significantly in tone as in title from die once highly influential The Bleak Age (1934) of J.L. and Barbara Hammond. Mrs. Thatcher's Victorian England is thus more in accord with current Victorian historiography than Mr. Kinnock's. Hers was not die bleak "otiier" of the Welfare State: it was the Britannia diat ruled die waves, die "Workshop of die World," in its time the most modern productive, prosperous, peaceful nation die world has ever seen, thanks in large part to "Victorian values." Mrs. Thatcher defined diese as selfrespect , self-reliance, hard work, cleanliness, neighborliness, and national pride. As she noted, tiiey were not exclusively Victorian. She called diem "perennial," as befitted someone who came from diat intensely respectable middle class — shop-keeping, chapel-going — who clung to diem most fiercely, and whose contribution to Victorian England is still neglected in Victorian social historiography. After Samuel's astute analysis of die contemporary political bearings of Victorian values, come ten essays of high overall quality on their historical context. Appropriately, in view of the symposium's Edinburgh venue, RJ. Morris and Stewart J. Brown emphasize die importance of Scotland — birthplace of die mechanics' institute, die savings bank, teetotalism, Samuel Smiles and Thomas Chalmers — as an ideological hothouse for die articulation of Victorian values. In his essay Mark Girouard examines die titinnish soil of die upper classes for signs of Victorian values, while in his, Clyde Binfield turns over die rich loam of Victorian non-conformity. Well worth contemplating, in view of die importance of Victorian literature in shaping our notion of die era (a much greater importance than most historians realize, let alone admit), is Valentine Cunningham's exploration of die "guilty impasse" between die anti-mammonism of so many Victorian novels, and die "bargain mindedness" required by die literary marketplace of those who wrote diem...

Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France by John R. Harris

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 685 Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France. By John R. Harris. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum (Ashgate Pub­ lishing), 1992. Pp. x + 223; notes, index. $59.95. This important, tightly focused anthology by a leading British histo­ rian of technology, economics, and business presents a major thesis involving two related themes. John Harris is concerned first with craft skills. The role of craftsmen has been neglected in the literature since Samuel Smiles concentrated on heroic engineers, inventors, and selfmade men. This initial bias was reinforced by class snobbery, which found the idea that working people have played an important positive role in industry and technological innovation to be repugnant. Diffusion has been neglected through nationalistic bias that focuses research on a few innovative nations (for their further glorification). But surely the norm is diffusion and the creative grafting of new technologies to old cultures. The time is ripe for new research on the role ofworkers and on the diffusionoftechnology, and therefore this anthology is mostwelcome. Chapter 1 reprints Harris’s classic essay, “Skills, Coal, and British Industry in the Eighteenth Century.” His thesis can be paraphrased briefly: “With the progressive adoption ofcoal as an industrial fuel from the late sixteenth century the technological basis of British industry” diverged from that of the Continent. One industry after another adapted coal fuel, glass, and nonferrous metals among them, reaching a sort of climax with the use of coke to produce cast and wrought iron. It was necessary to prevent contamination of industrial materials by harmful coal impurities, often using variations on the reverberatory (or “air”) furnace and other devices (e.g., covered crucibles for glass). The remarkable success of this series of interlocked innovations was made possible by “the creation of new skills and craft processes” that diffused by spinoff from one industry to another, “but which for any single industry came to depend upon a concatenation of both the specialized skills of separate groups of craftsmen and of new types of plant and equipment unknown, or less known in Europe. The craftsmen came to have a developed knowledge of the varieties of coal and of the vagaries of materials to be used with it.” Dependence on craft skills hampered diffusion and stimulated large-scale, organized industrial espionage on the part of England’s great enemy and rival, France (p. 173). There were many collateral developments associated with coal use, such as canals, long-wall coal mining, and the invention of the steam engine. The transfer of technology was not a one-way street, nor was France the only player. Chapter 2, “Saint-Gobain and Ravenhead,” deals with an interesting case of double diffusion: the British were recruiting French workers in order to learn French methods ofcasting plate glass while the French were attempting to emulate the British use of coal instead of increasingly scarce wood in glass production. Chapter 3, “Attempts to Transfer English Steel Techniques to France in the Eighteenth Century,” shows that the determined efforts by the French government to gain a 686 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE critical technology, crucible steel, were unsuccessful precisely because of the complex range of craft knowledge involved. Despite the conspicuous failure to transfer the technology of crucible steel, French government-organized industrial espionage was very suc­ cessful, as indicated by Harris’s pathbreaking overview, “Industrial Es­ pionage in the Eighteenth Century.” French agents, at some risk, pene­ trated Boulton and Watt’s factory, the Carron Iron Works, and much more; the French were surprisingly well informed concerning British technical advances. They developed successful methods of recruiting craftsmen and gaining knowledge. Indeed, the noted British ironmaster John Wilkinson willingly collaborated with the French, and his brother William went to France to establish a cannon foundry near Nantes and then helped create a great coke-based iron complex at Le Creusot. In chapter 4, Harris presents a detailed case study of one of the most successful transfers, that of the Birmingham “toy” trade (but­ tons, hardware, etc.). This transfer was not arranged by espionage; the mentally unstable (but skilled) Michael Alcock fled bankruptcy to settle in France. Thus his poor head for business and inability...