Stoke Newington Research Articles

Nursery World visits… N Family Club Stoke Newington

Nicole Weinstein visits a nursery in the London borough of Hackney to look at the resources and learning that takes place in the atelier

Collectors, class and conflict at the lower palaeolithic discovery at Stoke Newington, 1878-1884

ABSTRACT This paper uses events following the 1878 discovery of a rich Lower Palaeolithic ‘living floor’ at Stoke Newington, London, to explore the social and economic relationships and imbalances that existed within Palaeolithic archaeology in the mid to late nineteenth century. It explores in particular the role of the British working classes in amassing the extant record, the biases they might have introduced and the value of this archaeology to their own lives and livelihoods.

A new normal? The inordinate ordinary of COVID times

This article responds to the seismic transformations in urban relations to the ordinary, which have emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a condition in which mundane objects and actions have been permeated by the pressure of law and ethics. I draw together reflections from an ethnography conducted a few years ago in the strictly orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, London, with more recent autoethnographic reflections from the adjacent area of Stoke Newington. Exploring productive resonances between these times, spaces and scenes, the article challenges prominent representations of orthodox life as pathologically invested in the ordinary. I seek to enact a form of what Veena Das terms ‘adjacent thinking’ to make two interventions: first, to shed new light on the violence, pressures and possibilities of the transfiguration of the pandemic everyday; and second, to explore how we might cope with our yearning for the mundane-of-before by engaging with an emergent vitality in our relations to the ordinary.

John Eastoe (1926–2021)

John Eric Eastoe was born in Stoke Newington, north London, in 1926 to Sunday school teacher Winifred and real-estate quantity surveyor Eric. He was very bright with a natural aptitude for science and attended Hungerford Road Infant and Junior School before earning himself a place at Minchenden Grammar School. In 1947, John graduated from Imperial College London with a BSc in chemistry. He continued his studies at Imperial and, under the supervision of Professor Cook in the Department of Agricultural Chemistry, gained a PhD in plant nutrition in 1950 with his thesis entitled ‘A study of the effect of the porous earthenware flower pot on the nutrition of plants’.On completing his PhD, John took up a post as Senior Research Officer at the British Gelatine and Glue Research Association in London where Professor Alan Ward was in the process of assembling a team of bright young scientists, whose purpose was to study the scientific basis of gelatine and animal glue manufacture and use. John not only became part of the scientific endeavour at ‘BG squared’ (BG2), as he affectionately referred to the Association, but it was also where he met his future wife, Beryl, who was employed there as a lab technician. They married in 1951. In 1957, John moved on to the Department of Dental Science at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, where he became a Leverhulme and Freemasons Research Fellow in the Department of Dental Science. This shift in research interests proved fruitful, and he went on to receive various awards for his contributions to dental research: the Colgate–Palmolive Prize for Dental Research (1960; International Association for Dental Research [IADR]); the European Organisation for Caries Research (ORCA) Prize (1965) for work on enamel proteins; and an IADR Distinguished Scientist Award for Basic Research in Biological Mineralisation (1969). In 1965, he was awarded a DSc (Biochemistry) on the merits of his published work, the scientific achievement he was most proud of. In 1980, John and Beryl relocated from London to the North East, where John was appointed Professor of Oral Physiology/Biology and Head of the Department of Oral Physiology (later Oral Biology) at Newcastle University. Five years later he became an elected Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Dental Surgery; FDSRCS) and in 1990 he retired, remaining an emeritus professor of Newcastle University.At 94 years young, John had outlived most of his colleagues and contemporaries, and retrospectively piecing together his academic career and research interests has been hampered somewhat by the passage of time and our own lack of expertise. Nonetheless, looking back over his extensive published work reveals an interesting journey from his early days in plant nutrition and flowerpots, via gelatine and collagen research, papers on bone composition and analytical methods and seminal work on enamel proteins (including amelogenins), through to numerous publications in the field of dental and oral biology. In addition, John also (co-)authored a number of text books over the course of his career and latterly served as an editorial advisor for the Biochemical Journal, remaining a member of the Biochemical Society throughout his retirement. It seems that his natural curiosity, intellect and understanding of biochemistry, coupled with a thorough application of basic science and analytical techniques, took him a long way.Although not dentally qualified himself, John did exceptionally well working alongside dental professionals. One of the things he enjoyed most about his role at Newcastle University was the care of his students, and he took a keen interest in both teaching and pastoral care, also serving as an external examiner for a number of UK universities as well as the Universities of Hong Kong and Malaysia. One graduate from the dental school at Newcastle who was interviewed, and later taught, by ‘Prof’ Eastoe recalled how he would play classical music at the beginning of his lectures. Another very fondly described how Prof’s door was always open and remembers his enthusiasm, encouragement and support and the integral role this played in her studies, and subsequently her professional development.John was an intelligent man with an inquiring mind, which remained sharp even in his 90s. He was also funny, thoughtful and caring – a true gentleman. John sadly passed away in February 2021 and is survived by his wife Beryl, children Sally and Richard, seven grandchildren and nine great grandchildren. He will be missed and remembered affectionately by all who had the privilege of knowing him.

The forensics of the pavement

Abstract This text represents a small experiment in writing. It is centred on an urban Hackney patch outside the flat where I stay in Stoke Newington, north London. It attempts to take in some dynamics of past and present, the composition of the pavement and some history above and below it. Hackney itself was once an orchard retreat for plague victims, but this patch is now territory of tarmac, pollution, foxes, shoppers, gulls, cyclists, a shooting, a mugging and a boy hidden in a bin. But it is a community, a functioning one, full of life. Influences on this episodic approach come from George Perec, with his invitations to transcribe the city; Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, with his theory of the city based on rhythm, and Tim Ingold’s ‘anthropology’ of line, capturing the traces and threads that compose and surround our lives.

Alfred Lewis Hodgson

Born in St Helens in 1931, Alfred Lewis Hodgson qualified from the University of Liverpool in 1956. After national service as a flying officer in the Royal Air Force’s medical...

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” by Maximillian E. Novak

Reviewed by: Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” by Maximillian E. Novak Nicholas Seager Maximillian E. Novak. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.”. Newark: Delaware, 2014. Pp. x + 239. $75. Defoe is sometimes accused of cobbling together the Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) out of a motley mix of unconnected essays written many years earlier. The present book comprises eleven of Mr. Novak’s previously published essays, some lightly (and tacitly) revised, with a new introduction and afterword. The oldest essay was originally published in 1982, though most are more recent: eight are from 2007 or later. Mr. Novak explains that the essays are “partly products of my writing the extensive notes and introductions to the three volumes” of Robinson Crusoe that will be published as part of the laggard Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. Collectively the essays situate Defoe as an experimental and innovative novelist during the “miraculous years of inventiveness and imagination” from 1718 to 1724 in which he produced his major prose fictions. Robinson Crusoe is the focus of all of the essays, though there are insightful comments on the author’s other [End Page 114] novels. No less than Defoe’s essays in the final part of Crusoe, Mr. Novak’s pieces hang together surprisingly well in their repurposed form. In Chapter 1, “Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form” (first published in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel in 1996), Mr. Novak demonstrates that Defoe progressively explored ways of rendering “independent characters who tell their stories as emanations of their character and experiences,” as he advanced from works like A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718), through Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), to The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Mr. Novak shows in Chapter 2 how Defoe’s interest in the techniques of realist painting, and in Chapter 3 how his “sense of the inadequacy of language,” informed his practice as an imaginative writer. These aesthetic and intellectual contexts account not only for his vivid attempt to render “the Thing itself”—to find a form of verisimilitude that did justice to lived experience—but also for his conceptual investigation of the inherent difficulty of so doing. Defoe emerges not as a naïve realist and accidental novelist, but as a man with a vast range of interests that he brought to bear on the form and content of his fiction, whether as an effort to capture realistically a seascape during a torrent or to flag the deceptive uses of language by self-apologists like Roxana. Chapter 4 addresses Crusoe’s early reception, particularly Defoe’s playful yet persistent presentation of the novel, in the Serious Reflections, as an authentic memoir that is simultaneously allegorical and satirical. For Mr. Novak, neither autobiographical allegory nor topical satire satisfactorily explains Defoe’s generic achievement in Crusoe; he prefers the broader label “fiction,” which defines an imaginative work designed to entertain the reader by producing a “world vividly imagined” and foregrounding a “novelistic character, with a variety of emotions and a history that weighs on his memory.” But though Defoe was deliberately working out questions of form, including technique and genre, for Mr. Novak Defoe is above all an artist of ideas, who in Crusoe explored the complexity of social, ethical, and anthropological themes such as cannibalism (chapter 5), utopianism (chapter 6), seafaring (chapter 8), and exile (chapter 10). In these chapters, the practical-minded Defoe, the topical writer who was trying to ascertain how navigation might be improved and how colonies could be established in the Caribbean, exists alongside Defoe the thinker, prepared to investigate utopian possibilities despite his pessimism over their achievability and concerned with “exile as both a painful physical and a psychological state,” a metaphor and a real condition. The point is not just that Defoe simultaneously established a new realism committed to rendering the physical world and explored the multitudinously symbolic potential of fiction, but also that these aspects of his works are inseparable, just as the distinction...

An Interview with Thurston Moore

On August 13, 2013, I got together with Thurston Moore in his flat in Stoke Newington to discuss how his readings in contemporary American poetry influenced some of the songs on the recently-released self-titled album by his post-Sonic Youth band, Chelsea Light Moving. We never really got around to talking about the record, as we spent most of our three or so hours together having a wide-ranging conversation about Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dan Graham, Dee Dee Ramone, Clark Coolidge, Lydia Lunch, and beyond. This is a condensed and lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Sixty glorious years

British Journal of Healthcare Management 2012 Vol 18 No 6 293 Meanwhile in Denmark, George Jorgenson made headlines by becoming Christine Jorgenson, all thanks to pioneering surgeon Christian Hamburger. In Britain it would still be a very long time before sex change operations became a talking point. There were other things of more immediate concern. In November of 1952 the founding of the Royal College of General Practitioners would pass almost unnoticed. Carbon emissions and global warming were not even a speck on the horizon, but another environmental threat was a clear and present danger. Between 5 and 9 December, London experienced its worst ever peasouper smog. Three million cotton face masks were handed out; but by 20 December 4000 Londoners had died. Some 12 000 Londoners in total died of respiratory problems that winter. Officially the Government blamed the deaths on influenza—spin is not a new phenomenon. Governments always prefer good news. In October, to great fanfare, the first health centre to be built under the under the NHS Act had been opened in Stoke Newington. But such good news masked a great deal of bad. The worst news of all was that the Treasury cupboard was bare. The NHS, the four year-old jewel in the crown of post-war Britain, was heading for bankruptcy. The immediate cause of the economic crisis was the Americans. In 1952 the USA ‘yanked’ the carpet from under the NHS when it demanded a start to the repayment of the vast war loans it had lent to Britain in its then still-recent fight against Nazi Germany. Something had to give—and what gave was the NHS. Things that had been free since 1948, glasses, false teeth, and prescriptions, were, from 1 June 1952, subject to a charge. Aneurin Bevan, the Minster of Health and Godfather of the NHS, resigned from the cabinet. And things only got worse. High Court Judge Sir Harold Danckwerts was asked to adjudicate in the matter of GPs’ pay. The GPs claimed that the Government had reneged on a pay agreement made with them in 1948: the judge agreed. The Danckwerts Award of 1952, granted GPs £27 million just in back pay. The Guillebaud Report of 1955 later found that in relative terms NHS spending fell between 1948 and 1954, from 3.75 to 3.25% of GNP, and that capital spending was running at only 33% of pre-war levels. As for NHS managers’ pay, how did that fare? The various clerks and secretaries who headed our NHS organisations back then did not enjoy today’s salary levels. Let one stand for all—the Gateshead Executive Council (forerunner of the modern PCT) advertised for a new chief executive at the end of 1952. The salary? £795 per annum rising by four annual increments to £950. In 2012 terms that works out at just £17 800–21 300. Managers retiring this year can thank their lucky stars that NHS salaries, and pensions, have moved on a bit in sixty years! BJHCM Steve Ainsworth reflects on changes to NHS management over the past sixty years Sixty glorious years

Reflections on the riots in Hackney

![][1] Unlike some surgeries around the country, ours was neither attacked nor forced to close during the recent riots in England, although major street-fighting and looting took place in nearby Dalston and Tottenham. Shops close by in Stoke Newington were largely spared as a result of the mobilisation of the local Turkish community to defend shops and restaurants from the mobs threatening to extend their raids from Mare Street further north. The Turkish mobilisation revealed a stark contrast between the cultures in the north and south of the borough, the former more independent and entrepreneurial, the latter more atomised and dependent on welfare and other forms of state intervention. The Turkish community is large and diverse, but it has strong … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Low-volume-loss tunnelling for London ring main extension

The Thames Water ring main extension is a 4·5 km long tunnel from Stoke Newington, in the London borough of Hackney, to New River Head in Finsbury, in the London borough of Islington. The 2·85 m i.d. tunnel was excavated by an earth pressure balance tunnel-boring machine (TBM) at depths between 40 and 60 m below the surface. Surface settlements along the route were measured by precise levelling, and were found to be small. It was therefore even more important to measure these settlements as accurately as possible, in order to provide informed estimates of subsurface movements induced in third-party underground structures much closer to the tunnel horizon. Because of the relatively large magnitude of the background movements measured, when compared with the small tunnel-induced settlements, it was necessary to adopt a rigorous statistical method to fit a Gaussian curve to the data. This exploited the analogy of the ‘error function' to define the Gaussian curve parameters i and Vl. In all, 13 tunnels were underpassed successfully by the TBM, all within the ‘conservative expected value' predictions, and without incident. The predictions and structural monitoring schemes undertaken for the High Speed 1 tunnels near Corsica Street and the Northern line tunnels near Angel station are described in the paper. It was found that the surface and subsurface trough width parameter K did not vary with depth as predicted: therefore a new relationship is proposed.

Stepping Sideways

Stepping Sideways Thomas Elsaesser It is my great pleasure and honour to have been asked to address the forty-ninth annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. That I should do so as this year's recipient of the Society's annual Lifetime Membership Award (for Distinguished Career Achievement) gives the occasion an especially festive allure, and I want to express my appreciation to the members of the committee for having selected me. As I accept the Award with gratitude, and a due sense of the responsibility that comes with such a distinction, I also want to extend warm thanks to Lucy Fisher, for her most generous introductory remarks, and to Patrice Petro for hosting me this evening as the Society's special guest. Such a lifetime membership award invites—indeed obliges—one to enter into a retrospective frame of mind. I'm not too blasé to admit that the idea of one's peers thinking one has an achievement to look back on does soothe quite a few anxieties. It soothes the worry that what one has done doesn't really amount to much; it soothes the worry that what one is personally most proud of has gone unnoticed or unrecognized; and for many other common and garden-variety anxieties, such a distinction is a wonderful plaster on the narcissistic wound and a palliative for any soul not immune to self-doubt. It's like a general amnesty—a pardon, a reprieve—in the perpetual plea bargaining between me and myself. And yet, while the pleasure is real, so is the dawning realization that this is not, say, a mid-career show. This is a "lifetime" award, and therefore a hint—a gentle hint, for sure, but a hint nonetheless—that it may be time to prepare, if not for a retreat, then for taking a step sideways. And this I am happy to do, the more so, when I think—still in this retrospective mood for a few more minutes, if you will forgive me—that my career has really been a series of sideways steps, or to put it too bluntly: my career as a film scholar has often seemed based on a series of misunderstandings—mostly productive ones, to be sure, but (in true melodramatic fashion) out of sync, too soon, too late, the right thing at the wrong place, or vice versa. [End Page 121] I do not mean the misunderstandings about my name: in the 1970s, the tease was that "Elsaesser" could only rhyme with "Althusser." And in the 1980s, when I was living in North London, I rented a flat in Stoke Newington—some of you here may even remember it—from a Hasidic landlord, who would never have signed the lease had he not thought I was Jewish, presumably because all his neighbors were called Breslauer, Wertheimer, or Rosenthaler. But because in the London telephone directory I was listed just ahead of a Dr. El-Sayed and a Mrs. El-Saway, I would regularly receive letters addressed to Dr. El-sasser, reminding me of my duty to Allah, and asking me for generous donations to the Finsbury Park Mosque. Nor do I mean the misunderstandings about my nationality, which ended (to cut short a long story of mistaken identities) with the Dutch thinking I'm English, whereas the Germans think I'm Dutch, and only the Americans have the good sense of knowing I'm from "Europe." I mean a different misunderstanding. The filmmaker Harun Farocki once told me how surprised he was about the international success of his film Images of the World and Inscription of War. He said: "I made the film in 1987 against nuclear power and cruise missiles on German soil, and it came back to me from America in 1990 as a film about the Holocaust." I think I know what he meant: I wrote an essay about melodrama in 1972, to put in my bid, as it were, in a discussion about "authorship" and "genre," hotly debated around the British Film Institute by, among others, Peter Wollen, Jim Kitses, Ed Buscombe, and Colin McArthur, and it came back to me in 1975 as...

REVIEWS

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesVolume 23, Issue 2 p. 233-246 REVIEWS First published: 01 October 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2000.tb00588.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: The House of forgery in eighteenth-century Britain. By Paul Baines. Aldershot: Ashgate. 1999. Gillray observed: the earliest account of his caricatures in ‘London und Paris’. By Christiane Banerji and Diana Donald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Consumers and luxury. Consumer culture in Europe 1650–1850. Edited by Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1999. Wrestling with Defoe: approaches from a workshop on Defoe's prose. Edited by Marialuisa Bignami. Università Degli Studi di Milano Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia. Cisalpino. Bologna: Instituto Editoriale Universitario. 1997. An essay upon projects. By Daniel Defoe. Edited by Joyce D. Kennedy, Maximillian E. Novak and Michael Seidel. The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. New York: AMS Press. 1999. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism. By Gregory Dart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment. Edited by Clement Hawes. New York: St Martin's Press. Reading the Enlightenment: system and subversion. By Julie Candler Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. The French Revolution as blasphemy: Johan Zoffany's paintings of the massacre at Paris, 1792. By William L. Pressly. University of California Press. 1999. Eighteenth-century ceramics: products for a civilised society. By Sarah Richards. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Short-title catalogue of eighteenth-century Spanish books in the British Library. Vol. i: Catalogue A-L; vol. ii: Catalogue M-Z; vol. iii: Indexes. London: The British Library. 1994. Wörterkrieg. Politische Debattenkultur in England 1689–1750. By Karl Gilman Winkler. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 1998. Volume23, Issue2September 2000Pages 233-246 RelatedInformation

The micrographia of Sir Henry Head (1861–1940)

Henry Head1 was born of Quaker stock on 4 August 1861 at 6 Park Road, Stoke Newington. Educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge (1st class in both parts of...

Letter

99 CHILD’S PLAY In Newsweek, January 21, 2008, Jon Scieszka, the first ‘‘children’s literature laureate ’’ ever so designated, and the author of ‘‘Stinky Cheese Man,’’ and ‘‘The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs,’’ listed his ‘‘five most important books.’’ Number Two on the list was Tristram Shandy, about which he writes, ‘‘My own book ‘Stinky Cheese Man’ owes a ton to this quixotic, convoluted narrative.’’ Number Three on the list was Thomas Pynchon ’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Numbers One, Four, and Five were books for children. FROM THE SHANDEAN In volume 17 (2006) of the Shandean, are several brief notes of interest. Accepting the challenge thrown out by an overly skeptical critic that no one has ever seen a drawing on the blank page provided by Sterne in volume VI of Tristram Shandy, David A. Brewer notes a copy in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, where a reader accepted Sterne’s invitation to draw the Widow Wadman; and, in a second note, Brigette Friant-Kessler locates a second drawing in the BL (shelfmark 1509/3513). Both illustrations are reproduced—one a very faint caricature, the other, a ‘‘rather poorly executed pencil drawing of a female subject but with strikingly masculine features .’’ As Mr. Brewer notes, the exception (s) in this case may amply prove the rule. Also in this issue are 95 lines from an epic adaptation of Tristram Shandy by Irving Washington, of Forest City, Iowa, submitted to a local poetry journal, the Grub Street Grackle, a week before the author’s death on April 1, 2006. This information is gathered from prefatory remarks submitted by Amos Hunt, the journal’s editor—the Shandean gives no hint of the probability that Mr. Hunt is to Irving Washington as Sterne is to Tristram Shandy (April 1!). At any rate, the poem is said to run to 20,000 lines and will be made available (serially, we assume) at grubstreetgrackle.com. A brief sample here will suffice, a passage based on Obadiah’s ‘‘eight knots’’ securing Dr. Slop’s bag of obstetrical instruments: . . . And is there not in this an allegory fitted to the case? For Laurence Sterne had nothing else in mind in his derangement of chronology but preservation of the human right to be amused. The number of the knots may also signify, for 8 is shaped as knotted rope, and also, on its side, is the sign of the eternal length of time for which Sterne doomed the fullness of his tale to suffer, prisoned in its tortured form. LETTER To the Editors: In a letter to the Scriblerian (40, Nos. 1 & 2, Autumn 2007–Spring 2008) about textual problems in The Political History of the Devil (1726), Irving N. Rothman—one of the two editors of this work in the Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition—criticises the edition in the Pickering & Chatto Works of Daniel Defoe, of which we are the General Editors, for adopting an emendation in the second edition (1727). The first edition reading of the passage in question refers to ‘‘one imperial Devil, Monarch or God of the whole clan of Hell.’’ In the second edition, ‘‘God’’ is changed to ‘‘King.’’ We are baffled by Rothman’s reproach, because in fact the Pickering & Chatto text edited by John Mullan (London, 2005) follows the first edition reading (see p. 46). Moreover, in his Textual Notes, Mullan cites this very passage as one in which the changed reading of the second edition ‘‘seems decidedly inferior, and unlikely to be authorial’’ (p. 325). W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank The Open University Irving Rothman replies: With regard to my statement in the Scriblerian (40, Nos. 1 & 2, Autumn 2007– 100 Spring 2008, 207), the paragraph in question should have read as follows: The editor must ocasionally use his judgment. The first edition speaks of ‘‘one imperial Devil, Monarch or God of the whole clan of Hell;’’ (Stoke Newington, p. 17; Pickering & Chatto, p. 46). The second edition diction changes ‘‘God’’ to ‘‘King,’’ which is a synonym of ‘‘Monarch’’ and simply repeats the term as a tautology. We think that Defoe was being ironic in his progression from the most undesirable personal to...

An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions by Daniel Defoe

32 where he felt it should go—on the English ministers who had preceded Bute and created a situation from which the nation was extricated only with considerable difficulty . I should not conclude the review without calling attention to the warm tribute to Professor Boucé written by Serge Soupel. Melvyn New University of Florida DANIEL DEFOE. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, ed. Kit Kincade. The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. New York: AMS, 2007. Pp. cii ⫹ 463. $158.50. Eighteenth-century scholars these days enjoy an embarrassment of riches when it comes to editions of Defoe’s works. In the wake of the dustup over the Defoe canon started by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens in 1988, we have not only the large (and wildly expensive) Works supervised by those two but also the Stoke Newington edition overseen by, among others, Maximillian Novak. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions is the fourth volume published in the Stoke Newington edition, and while the History of Apparitions is also available from Pickering & Chatto, it is sold by that firm only as part of a set—one volume in the eight-volume set containing ‘‘satire, fantasy and writings on the supernatural’’—that costs just under $600. So for Defoe scholars who are particularly interested in this important work by him or for libraries that want to augment their Defoe collection in a more modest way than that demanded by Pickering & Chatto, the present volume will be most welcome, not least because of the richly informative scholarly apparatus by Ms. Kincade (and, in respect to the notes, John G. Peters, one of the other General Editors of the Stoke Newington Edition). The History of Apparitions, as it has often been called, is one of three works published in 1726 and 1727 that treat ghosts, magic, dreams, spirits, and the like, a trilogy of sorts that also includes The Political History of the Devil and A System of Magick. These works, mostly collections of anecdotes, display a high degree of skepticism about many stories of spirits that are dismissed as mere superstition or fakery. But they, especially the History of Apparitions, also insist that the spiritual world is real and, indeed, that genuine ‘‘apparitions,’’ as Ms. Kincade puts it, ‘‘were part of the working of God’s Providence.’’ She largely lays out Defoe’s complicated view of such matters through an extended discussion of the views of Hobbes and Joseph Glanvill, showing that Defoe is neither as skeptical as the former nor as credulous as the latter. Ms. Kincade argues that Defoe used three tests in judging such stories: human reason, religious principles, and rhetorical analysis. Considering ‘‘his standards of logic, clarity, and piousness’’ in conjunction with one another, Defoe believed , allowed one to separate the rare authentic account of an apparition from the many inauthentic stories. Such analysis enabled him ‘‘to instruct his readers in what one must know to understand the nature and purpose of supernatural visitations’’ and also ‘‘to judge of apparitions and of discourses on the spectral.’’ Ms. Kincade also provides a thorough discussion of the issue of attribution and 33 well over one hundred pages of notes, textual and explanatory. For some, this apparatus will constitute, to some degree at least, rather too much of a good thing. Since the History of Apparitions has been attributed to Defoe from the eighteenth century onward and Furbank and Owens do not disagree with this attribution, the extended discussion of that issue seems unnecessary. Lengthy footnotes on such items as the Goths, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Jakob Böhme, the Basilica of St. Denis near Paris, Clarendon, and Muhammad, among others, often provide a good deal more information than the reader needs to negotiate Defoe’s text. Still, Ms. Kincade’s care and thoroughness indisputably provide readers with what will undoubtedly be the definitive edition of this work. Welcome as this edition is, this reviewer wishes that the Stoke Newington edition could serve not to duplicate the work of Furbank and Owens (all the AMS titles have also been published in the Pickering & Chatto edition of Defoe’s works), but to supplement...

Education, Class Fractions and the Local Rules of Spatial Relations

This paper develops previous analyses of data from an ESRC-funded study of middle-class parents' choices of childcare in two London locations (Battersea and Stoke Newington). It tentatively explores differences between the educational choices made in the two localities and connections which occur between educational and spatial preferences and practices. These connections within the two class fraction samples are presented using Basil Bernstein's arguments concerning the relations between pedagogical practices and social class. The argument is that the class fractions identified here use space differently and concomitantly engage in different kinds of social relations.

Middle Class Fractions, Childcare and the ‘Relational’ and ‘Normative’ Aspects of Class Practices

The emphasis in class research remains on the structural aspects of class, class processes are neglected. This paper focuses upon some relational and normative aspects of class through an examination of social divisions produced and constructed within middle class families' choices of childcare. Working with data from two contrasting settings in London (Battersea and Stoke Newington) three issues are addressed in the paper; the extent to which childcare arrangements both substantively and structurally position children differently within long term educational careers; the ways in which the use of choice in a market system of child care and education, works to produce patterns of social closure that quietly discriminate via the collectivist criterion of class and racial membership; and the ways in which child care choices also point-up and perpetuate subtle distinctions and tensions of values and lifestyle within the middle class, between class factions. Concepts drawn from the work of Bourdieu are deployed throughout.

Stoke Newington: geoarchaeology of the Palaeolithic ‘floor’

The archaeological importance of Stoke Newington lies in the recognition there in the nineteenth century of a Palaeolithic occupation horizon. Several attempts have been made in the last thirty years to relocate this horizon, but without success. A review of the nineteenth century accounts and of more recent investigations suggests that any evidence of Palaeolithic occupation is unlikely to be present as a simple, unique and readily traceable surface. The findings point to occupation, probably episodic, within Marine Isotope Stage 9 (MIS 9) during a period of fluvial aggradation. The evidence also suggests that the height range of the aggradational sediments, termed here the Stoke Newington Sands, is overlapped by sediments of a later and separate MIS 9 aggradation comprising the Highbury Silts and Sands, and by Late Devensian and Holocene sediments of the Hackney Brook, giving rise to a complex local stratigraphy.

Spaces of Dissent and the Public Sphere in Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Newington Green

Spaces of Dissent and the Public Sphere in Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Newington Green