tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/18th-century-78358/articles
18th century – The Conversation
2024-03-15T17:34:45Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/225844
2024-03-15T17:34:45Z
2024-03-15T17:34:45Z
This 18th-century shell collection, saved from a skip, tells a story of empire, explorers and women’s equality
<p>In the 1980s, a shell collection that included specimens from Captain Cook’s final voyage was accidentally thrown into a skip and believed lost forever. But much to the joy of scientists, last week it was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/12/shells-from-captain-cooks-final-voyage-saved-from-skip">rediscovered safe and sound</a> and donated to English Heritage.</p>
<p>Her name might not have made the headlines, but the woman who originally collected the shells, Bridget Atkinson (1732-1814), made a significant contribution to natural history in the 18th century. </p>
<p>Atkinson was one of many women interested in shells at this time. It was a pursuit that drew in both aristocratic and middle class enthusiasts. Among them were famous collectors, such as the philosopher and poet <a href="https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/publications/browse/9780300192230">Margaret Cavendish</a> and cousins Jane and Mary Parminter, the elite owners of the shell-encrusted house <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2012/nov/16/feminist-eccentric-home-devon">A la Ronde, in Exmouth</a>. </p>
<p>Collecting shells was a common past time in Enlightenment Britain. This was a period in which elite women were becoming <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xZFNEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=women+and+science+eighteenth+century&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=women%20and%20science%20eighteenth%20century&f=false">increasingly interested in the sciences</a>, and they pursued its disciplines with wild enthusiasm. </p>
<p>This is demonstrated in the popularity of books such as <a href="https://maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-francesco-algarotti-s-newtonianism-for-the-ladies#:%7E:text=The%20book%20consists%20of%20a,Naples%20on%20the%20title%20page.">Newtonianism for Ladies</a> by Francesco Algarotti. Published in 1737, the book was a bestseller and reprinted many times as the 18th century progressed. </p>
<p>Botany and natural history were deemed particularly appropriate vehicles for women’s intellectual curiosity. Women engaged in these practices were encouraged to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I1LzDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=women+and+science+eighteenth+century&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=women%20and%20science%20eighteenth%20century&f=false">collect specimens, create displays and study related literature</a>, often written by female authors. </p>
<p>As a result, the early 19th century saw the publication of various natural history books written by women, such as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=k0YyAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_book_other_versions_r&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Conchologist’s Companion</a> by Mary Roberts (1824), a series of letters on the properties of various types of shell.</p>
<h2>Atkinson’s collection</h2>
<p>While Atkinson wasn’t unusual as a woman collecting shells, the extent of her acquisitions sets them apart from many other collections of the period. She acquired as many as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/12/shells-from-captain-cooks-final-voyage-saved-from-skip">1,200 shells</a> throughout her lifetime, with many sourced from far-flung regions across the globe. </p>
<p>Atkinson was from a wealthy and genteel, but not aristocratic, family, and as a result, she is not as well known as other shell collectors of the time. Nevertheless, her collection includes a number of important specimens of endangered and protected species. Many were amassed from her connection to George Dixon, an armourer on <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/chesters-roman-fort-and-museum-hadrians-wall/history/bridget-atkinsons-shells/">Captain Cook’s third and final world voyage</a>. </p>
<p>While her surviving correspondence shows her to be a less-than-perfect writer, Atikinson’s expertise in natural history led to her becoming the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2013/jan/22/heritage-heritage#:%7E:text=Bridget%20Atkinson%20was%20the%20society%27s,was%20the%20first%20woman%20elected.">first female honorary member</a> of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1813. Women were still deemed ineligible for full membership until 1877.</p>
<p>Atkinson’s collection does not simply reflect the scientific interests of a curious individual. A study of their acquisition reveals a broad, even global, system at play. A number of her shells were gifted to Atkinson through the networks of the British empire.</p>
<p>Several members of Atkinson’s family were employed in imperial roles. Her son and brother-in-law were both a part of the mercantile colonising forces of the East India Company, and the latter even owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. This means the Atkinson family were direct beneficiaries of the enslavement of Black men and women in the Caribbean. </p>
<p>Atkinson used these connections to her advantage, writing to her relatives living abroad to ask for shells and even imploring family friends to do the same. In 1796, her friend Mary Yates wrote to her son John, who then lived in Virginia to pass on Atkinson’s request for <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/chesters-roman-fort-and-museum-hadrians-wall/history/bridget-atkinsons-shells/">“snail shells picked off the ground …the larger the better”</a>. </p>
<p>Conveyed through the very routes and mechanics of the British empire, Atkinson’s collections are indivisible from the wider history of colonialism. This is something that future displays of the shells will inevitably have to address.</p>
<h2>The history of Atkinson’s collection</h2>
<p>Despite their obvious significance today, Atkinson’s shells have not always been treated with reverence. The collection was passed down through various generations of the Atkinson family before eventually being acquired by Newcastle University in the 1930s (then known as King’s College). It was in this time that the shells were lost.</p>
<p>Having been discarded into a skip, an eagle-eyed marine zoologist named John Buchanan rescued them from obscurity. Going through his belongings after his death, his family discovered the collection and donated it to English Heritage. </p>
<p>This is not an unusual story. Viewed as trifling interests and trivial pursuits, a lack of interest in women’s collections of shells, both ornamental and scientific, has led to many examples being lost over the centuries. </p>
<p>The great sale of Margaret Cavendish’s collection in 1786 is a typical example. Her shells and corals from Britain, Italy and the Indian Ocean were all placed all for sale, alongside those collected for decorative purposes. Like Atkinson’s collection, <a href="https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/publications/browse/9780300192230">Cavendish’s shells included specimens from Cook’s travels</a>. But even this important association did not save them from being scattered widely.</p>
<p>As Atkinson’s shells reveal, the collection of these beautiful natural objects crossed continents, told vivid histories of imperialism and established women’s vital role in the development of natural history as a discipline. Their <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about-us/search-news/bridget-atkinsons-shell-collection-goes-on-display-at-chesters-roman-fort-hadrians-wall/">forthcoming display</a> at Chester’s Roman Fort and Museum will ensure that they continue to tell these stories long into the future. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Freya Gowrley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Collecting shells was a common past time in Enlightenment Britain, when elite women were becoming increasingly interested in science.
Freya Gowrley, Lecturer in History of Art and Liberal Arts, University of Bristol
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/225293
2024-03-08T13:35:16Z
2024-03-08T13:35:16Z
How three 18th century ‘deviant mothers’ defied social norms in their novel writing
<p>The onset of the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, had a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/England_and_the_French_Revolution.html?id=sA23AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">seismic impact</a> on British thinking. Ideas of the nation were <a href="https://archive.org/details/representationso0000paul">being hardened</a> through xenophobia, an unquestioned reverence for institutional authority and a vocabulary of English “manliness” and “chivalry”. The publication of philosopher Edmund Burke’s <a href="https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/burke/revfrance.pdf">Reflections on the Revolution in France</a> (1790) reinforced this conservative stance. </p>
<p>But at the same time, a small but steadily growing group of thinkers vocally <a href="https://archive.org/details/englishjacobinno0000kell/page/n7/mode/2up">supported the revolution</a> and called for similar class reforms in England. Many women writers <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-writing-and-revolution-1790-1827-9780198122722?cc=gb&lang=en">responded to these ideas with enthusiasm</a>. They knew that change, conservative or revolutionary, would inevitably shape gender relations and the fight for women’s rights.</p>
<p>Three such women, ridiculed at the time for their decisively radical writing, and celebrated for it today, are Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Their novels feature defiant and non-conforming heroines, who resist the tyranny of forced marriages and indifferent parents. Ultimately, they seek moral, intellectual and economic liberation. </p>
<p>This reconfiguration of the heroine includes portraying them as “deviant” mothers. This was especially important at a time when the definition of “virtuous motherhood” had become <a href="https://archive.org/details/politicsofmother0000bowe/page/34/mode/2up">increasingly restrictive</a>. These women resisted the traditional ideas of mothering not only by writing subversively but also by rebelling against the social norms that expected them to be acquiescent mothers raising submissive daughters themselves.</p>
<h2>1. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)</h2>
<p>Credited as the pioneer of first-wave feminism in England, Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her book, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3420">A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</a> (1792). But Wollstonecraft also wrote a fictional parallel to this work. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft reading a book" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580422/original/file-20240307-24-ggr1gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (circa 1790-1791).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MaryWollstonecraft.jpg">Tate Britain</a></span>
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<p><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/134/134-h/134-h.htm">Maria: or the Wrongs of Woman</a> (1798) chronicles the life of a woman who is married to an abusive husband. He publicly “proves” her mad, so she is confined in an asylum and can no longer see their infant daughter. Hopeless in prison, Maria writes a manuscript to her daughter, recording episodes from her harrowing life. </p>
<p>The warden at the asylum, Jemima, is a lower-class woman, born out of wedlock and stigmatised from birth. She grows up an impoverished orphan and is sexually abused by her stepfather and later by her employer. Her rape results in pregnancy and she aborts the child. The novel is a bleak commentary on the cyclical nature of sexual violence inflicted on mothers like Jemima and Maria, who live in the shadows of civil society.</p>
<p>We know her as the mother of the novelist Mary Shelley, but before her marriage to William Godwin, Wollstonecraft too had given birth to a daughter out of wedlock. While caring for her infant, Fanny, she coped with the abandonment of Fanny’s biological father. Her autobiographical travel writing, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3529/3529-h/3529-h.htm">Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark</a> (1796), was composed during this difficult period and dedicates extensive sections to her experiences as a new mother.</p>
<h2>2. Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)</h2>
<p>Charlotte Smith was unhappily married to a gambling addict, and of the 12 children born in this troubled marriage, only nine survived. </p>
<p>Her life as a writer was <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Charlotte_Smith.html?id=SfHMCwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">marked by desperation</a>, as she struggled to support her children and grandchildren and fought a lifelong legal battle for her father-in-law’s property. Smith wrote prolifically and her novels portray women at various stages of their lives, from older matriarchs leading the family to young mothers and women who give birth outside marriage. </p>
<p>These are often sympathetic portrayals, and the narrator doesn’t make a moral commentary. For instance, in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41646">Emmeline</a> (1788), one of the characters who gives birth to an “illegitimate” child is reunited with her lover and given a happy ending. This is transgressive as the norm was to depict “promiscuous” women as suffering and dying to caution young women readers. </p>
<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=930MDSl9EMQC&rdid=book-930MDSl9EMQC&rdot=1&pli=1">Desmond</a> (1792), Smith’s most overtly political novel, goes even further in its rebellion. Its English hero unequivocally sympathises with the revolutionaries in France. Moreover, he falls in love in love with a young mother of three children. There’s a convergence of personal and political liberation as the plot unfolds.</p>
<h2>3. Mary Robinson (1757-1800)</h2>
<p>Much like Smith and Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson championed women’s rights, education and autonomy. She <a href="https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-23857">acquired celebrity status</a> as a stage actress and was dubbed “Perdita” after the Shakespearean heroine. As a poet, she earned the informal title <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/12/sappho-phaon-mary-robinson">“the English Sappho”</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Painting of Mary Robinson with her dog." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580425/original/file-20240307-28-icfbxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Mrs Mary Robinson (Perdita) by Gainsborough (1781).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gainsborough_Mary-Robinson.jpg">Wallace Collection</a></span>
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<p>Her initial journey as an author resembles Smith’s. Robinson was coerced to marry young, to a man deep in gambling and debt. When he failed to repay his debts and was imprisoned, Robinson was sent to prison with him. However, she took <a href="https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/perdita-the-life-of-mary-robinson-text-only-paula-byrne?variant=32555097620558">the unusual step</a> of taking her infant daughter to prison with her rather than leaving her in a state care home, as was convention.</p>
<p>Robinson’s eventual rise to literary and theatrical stardom was accompanied by an unconventional personal life, as she separated from her husband and had several affairs. Unlike Smith, who presented herself as a self-sacrificing and chaste single mother to the public, Robinson became <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230118034_4%20OR%20https://www.jstor.org/stable/20798271?seq=29">a sexualised actress and author</a>, an even more “deviant mother”. Her memoirs were posthumously published by her daughter.</p>
<p>Robinson’s novel, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_natural_daughter.html?id=tsQwuAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">The Natural Daughter</a> (1799), set in the <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-writing-and-revolution-1790-1827-9780198122722?cc=gb&lang=en">backdrop of the French Revolution</a>, portrays a newly married heroine who takes an unmarried mother’s baby under her care in order to protect both the mother and the baby. When the biological mother goes missing, rumours arise that the baby is her own from an illicit affair, leading to the breakdown of her marriage. </p>
<p>The novel follows the lives of both women, the adoptive mother who faces shame and social ostracism, and the biological one who rises to fame as an actress – much like Robinson herself.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aditi Upmanyu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Their novels feature defiant heroines, who resist the tyranny of forced marriages and seek moral, intellectual and economic liberation.
Aditi Upmanyu, PhD candidate in English Literature, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220341
2024-02-23T16:56:53Z
2024-02-23T16:56:53Z
Modern democracies are in crisis. Could 18th-century political theorist Edmund Burke help us find a way out?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577100/original/file-20240221-16-b1sook.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=16%2C3%2C647%2C440&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke#/media/File:EdmundBurke1771.jpg">Studio of Joshua Reynolds/National Portrait Gallery/Wikipedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Even just 40 years ago, electoral participation on the scale we are witnessing in 2024 would have been unthinkable. More than half of the world’s population live in countries that will hold (or have already held) an election this year. </p>
<p>But this great year of elections will unfold against a backdrop of deep unease about the state of democracy. The <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/less-democratic">number of democracies</a> is declining, <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/spring-2022/global-public-opinion-in-an-era-of-democratic-anxiety">trust in democracy</a> is weakening, and <a href="https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2021/09/22/voter-turnout-is-declining-around-the-world">voter turnout</a> is trending downwards. </p>
<p>Appetite for <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/10/21/citizens-in-advanced-economies-want-significant-changes-to-their-political-systems/">political reform </a> is strong. Citizens have made their discontent known through abstention, protests, votes for anti-establishment candidates and even violence. </p>
<p>When thinking about how to address this crisis, we could do worse than looking to the 18th-century statesman and political theorist <a href="https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=edmund-burke--9781509538645">Edmund Burke</a> (1729-1797) who witnessed a similar crisis of representation not long after entering the British parliament. I</p>
<p>n 1768, radical MP John Wilkes was excluded from parliament having been earlier outlawed for <a href="https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-scandalous-case-of-the-north-briton-number-45/">libelling King George III</a> in a piece of journalism. Parliament then repeatedly refused to seat him when he won re-election several times, and eventually gave the seat to his defeated opponent instead. When troops fired on a crowd of Wilkes’s supporters, killing several, riots engulfed London for days. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A black and white engraving by William Hogarth depicting John Wilkes holding a bell that reads 'liberty' and smiling demonically" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577109/original/file-20240221-28-bc2n6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577109/original/file-20240221-28-bc2n6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577109/original/file-20240221-28-bc2n6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577109/original/file-20240221-28-bc2n6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577109/original/file-20240221-28-bc2n6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577109/original/file-20240221-28-bc2n6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577109/original/file-20240221-28-bc2n6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Hogarth’s satirical depiction of John Wilkes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes#/media/File:William_Hogarth_-_John_Wilkes,_Esq.png">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The reason parliament refused to admit Wilkes, Burke sensed, had less to do with his boorishness, demagoguery or slandering (today he would be branded a populist) and more to do with the opposition to King George that Wilkes gave voice to. Given that many members of parliament owed their pensions to the king, they were keen to avoid offending him by seating one of his enemies, even if this stoked popular anger. </p>
<p>When Wilkes became the focal point of a large campaign demanding political reform, MPs condemned the protesters as unruly (much as MPs today have tried to <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/police-powers-ban-protest-laws-suella-braverman/">restrict protests </a> in the name of public order). Popular sympathy with Wilkes <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1918953?searchText=wilkes%20liberty%20america&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dwilkes%2Bliberty%2Bamerica&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A8459be369fc9bd62a855709527520e35">even spread to America</a>, where colonists’ complaints about their own lack of representation had already occasioned violence and would eventually erupt into a full-blown war of independence. </p>
<h2>The people can always annihilate you</h2>
<p>In some ways we might have expected Burke to have sided with the MPs against a demagogue and his followers. After all, Burke is often associated with the view that representatives should be <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/447933">trustees rather than delegates</a> – that is, they should be free to act according to their own judgement rather than bend to popular pressures. </p>
<p>Burke famously told his own constituents in Bristol that he would not always obey them, especially when what they wanted was either unjust or foolish. When some Bristolians objected to more toleration for Catholics, for example, Burke refused to heed them. On this basis, it would not have been surprising if Burke had explained to the protesters that their grievances were misplaced and their actions futile. </p>
<p>But this is not at all how Burke approached the Wilkes crisis. Burke disliked Wilkes but rather than lecturing his supporters for protesting or defending parliament’s privileges, he warned his parliamentary colleagues about the dangers of failing to respond sympathetically to popular discontent. </p>
<p>What worried Burke was that parliamentarians would use public disorder as an excuse to numb themselves against legitimate protest, and so risk losing the people’s trust. As a representative institution, Burke argued, parliament’s job was to study and remedy popular complaints rather than dismiss them as unreasoned, unenlightened, or excessive. Even violent protesters never forfeited their right to representation. </p>
<p>As he put it in one of his speeches:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you lay down a rule that because the people are absurd, their grievances are not to be addressed, then it is impossible that popular grievances should receive any address at all, because the people when they are injured will be violent; when they are violent, they will be absurd – and their absurdity will in general be proportioned to the greatness of their grievances, and then the worse their suffering, the further they will be from their remedy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is not a Burke that will be familiar to many today. But it is the Burke that politicians the world over need to listen to. This is because politicians more than ever have a long list of excuses – from populist insurgencies to disinformation campaigns, from AI-deepfakes to media manipulation – for disregarding anti-establishment complaint as absurd, inauthentic or irrational. </p>
<p>The consequences of that disregarding, however, could be disastrous. The people can always do more than just vote or protest. As Burke cautioned his fellow MPs, even when it looks like the people can “do nothing else” they “will always be able to annihilate you”. Burke’s point was that all government rests <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/parliamentarism/57C359D3A3A5CE47DD91391EBB83711C">ultimately on popular opinion</a>, meaning that if people decide in large numbers to withhold their assent to obey, then something closer to a revolution could result.</p>
<p>Securing representative democracy may thus require politicians to show more openness to democratic reforms, more sympathy to protesters and less willingness to use populism as a pretext for democratic retrenchment.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578295/original/file-20240227-16-jdy3wr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578295/original/file-20240227-16-jdy3wr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578295/original/file-20240227-16-jdy3wr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578295/original/file-20240227-16-jdy3wr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578295/original/file-20240227-16-jdy3wr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578295/original/file-20240227-16-jdy3wr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578295/original/file-20240227-16-jdy3wr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Far right parties and politicians are mounting election campaigns all over the world in 2024. Join us in London at 6pm on March 6 for a salon style discussion with experts on how seriously we should take the threat, what these parties mean for our democracies – and what action we can take. Register for your place at this <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/social-science-perspectives-on-the-far-right-tickets-838612631957?aff=theconversation"><strong>free public session here</strong></a>. There will be food, drinks and, best of all, the opportunity to connect with interesting people.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220341/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ross Carroll is the author of the forthcoming book Edmund Burke.</span></em></p>
When parliament blocked a radical MP from taking his seat in parliament, Burke warned that ignoring the people’s democratic will could have disastrous consequences.
Ross Carroll, Assistant Professor of Political Science , Dublin City University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/221534
2024-01-26T13:28:40Z
2024-01-26T13:28:40Z
Who owns the royal body? Public interest in royal health reveals anxieties about our rulers
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571618/original/file-20240126-15-1c52dw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C2%2C1928%2C1568&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">George, Prince of Wales, was mocked in the 18th century press for his profligate lifestyle</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/32912001">British Museum</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Royal bodies are constantly in the news. In January 2024 alone, reports range from the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/denmark-queen-margrethe-abdication-what-to-know-389235c59f6fa081bf14c42db1ce5eee">abdication of Queen Margarethe of Denmark</a> for health reasons to the illnesses of the British royal family. </p>
<p>The first announcement, that Princess Kate will take a break from royal duties while she <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68009259">recovers from “abdominal surgery”</a>, was immediately followed by <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68010563">King Charles’ statement</a> about an operation for his enlarged prostate. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/17/king-charles-to-be-treated-in-hospital-for-enlarged-prostate">“Keen to share”</a>, he encouraged others to have a checkup. </p>
<p>Soon after, the announcement that the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68047608">Duchess of York</a> has melanoma was accompanied by her caution <a href="https://business.itn.co.uk/raising-awareness-of-skin-cancer-the-duchess-of-york-diagnosed-with-melanoma/">to check our moles</a>. </p>
<p>Current media fascination with the British royal family’s health reflects a long-standing tension between what the public should be entitled to know about the royal body and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/17/princess-of-wales-in-london-hospital-abdominal-surgery">that person’s right to privacy</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4sv9sJRmyTI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Popular UK breakfast TV show Lorraine exemplifies media fascination with royal health.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Royal health has been scrutinised for centuries</h2>
<p>Historically, royal bodies have attracted public interest, with British newspapers from the 18th century reporting on royal illnesses or commenting on royal diets.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-67475155">Our research</a> examines <a href="https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.FOOD.5.134745?mobileUi=0">the diet of the royal household</a> during the Regency period (circa 1789-1720), when King George III reigned. The diet and bodies of King George III and his son, Prince George revealed the nature of their rule and the fitness of the British nation.</p>
<p>It is difficult to reconcile the mortal bodies of individual rulers with the continuation of the monarchy as an institution and the head of the Church of England. For pre-modern people, the concept of the <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691169231/the-kings-two-bodies">“king’s two bodies”</a> explained how the divine right to rule simultaneously existed within the spiritual and symbolic institution of monarchy and the individual bodies of rulers. </p>
<p>The growing division between a nation’s sovereignty and the king as an individual in the 18th century raised questions about when a monarch might be unfit to rule. In some ways, the king’s body belonged to the nation. </p>
<p>Parliament, for example, closely monitored George III’s daily life. The royal household was required to report its accounts – including the foods eaten daily – to the counting house of the king’s household, the <a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C202">Board of the Green Cloth</a>. </p>
<p>George III’s well-known mental illness, moreover, nearly caused a political crisis in 1788. <a href="https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/speccoll/2023/11/01/bulletin-on-the-state-of-king-george-iiis-health-october-2011-2/">Although newspapers updated the public regularly</a> on the king’s health, the reports protected the king’s privacy by giving few details, while easing fears about his fitness to rule. </p>
<h2>Royal lifestyle as a reflection of royal morality</h2>
<p>George III looked after his body. He felt that there was a <a href="https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discovery/history-stories/inside-georges-breeches-the-health-of-george-iv/">family history of obesity</a>, to which he did not want to succumb, so he watched his diet to control his weight. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="King George III eats a frugal meal of boiled eggs -- within luxurious surroundings -- with wife, Queen Charlotte, who eats leafy greens." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=726&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=726&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=726&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571232/original/file-20240124-15-st4a7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=913&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">King George III was lampooned in the national press for his abstemious diet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1851-0901-617">British Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Because of this, some of his contemporaries saw him as miserly, despite the 20 course dinners served to him daily. His eating habits were well known because his body was always on display, from a picnic at Egham horse races to royal feasts. In 1788, when George III’s health problems began, his body and his appetites became even more interesting to the nation. <a href="https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/blog/georges-marvellous-medicine-rcp-archives-and-madness-king-george">Doctors moved into Kew</a>, where the king was being kept. They managed his diet, as part of his treatment, and regular bulletins were issued so that the king’s subjects were aware of what was happening to the sovereign’s body.</p>
<p>While George III’s ostentatious abstemiousness led him away from excessive drinking, his son was known to consume vast quantities of alcohol and food. Prince George was an unpopular British royal. His corpulence was used to lampoon him and his perceived lack of self control may partly explain his unpopularity. Fatness in the Regency period was <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/revealed-how-the-georgians-taught-us-to-diet-300-years-ago/">associated with wastefulness</a>. </p>
<p>Eating the right types of foods was important. Bodies were considered to be porous, easily affected by the environment or diet. Moral (or immoral) qualities might enter the body, depending on what was eaten. When satirical cartoonist James Gillray criticised the prince, he used food and body metaphors to make powerful political points. </p>
<p>In one instance, in 1787, he showed the prince, with his parents, gobbling up the wealth of the nation. An image from 1792 sets the prince’s corpulence alongside the unpaid bills that surround him.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Colour caricature of King George III, Queen Charlotte and the Prince of Wales seated outside the treasury around a bowl of guineas, ladling coins into their mouths" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571541/original/file-20240125-23-ofefj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Monstrous Craws: 1787 caricature of King George III, Queen Charlotte and the Prince of Wales gorging on the nation’s wealth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1868-0808-10314">British Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both men were seen to have flawed bodies. The king’s apparent stinginess, expressed through food and drink (as much as his illness) was considered the nation’s problem. Meanwhile, his son consumed conspicuously, eating and drinking with abandon, and <a href="https://www.rct.uk/collection/georgian-papers-programme/official-correspondence-of-george-iv-as-prince-of-wales">plunging into debt</a> through <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/george_fourth_01.shtml">extravagant expenditures</a>.</p>
<h2>Who owns the royal body?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies">The public remains fascinated by royal bodies</a>, despite being unconcerned about fitness to rule or the “king’s two bodies”. Without such frameworks, interest can slip into prurience. If the king is merely a person, then his body should be his own and he is entitled to all privacy. </p>
<p>Although the king and duchess have chosen to publicise their health problems, the princess’ diagnosis remains heavily guarded. Crucially, the messages are tightly controlled. The king and duchess have known about their problems for months, but only recently made them public. They also emphasised the public health benefits of sharing their stories, which simultaneously deflected from private details and the princess’ operation. Just as with George III’s illness, the overarching royal narrative is designed to offer privacy, particularly for Princess Kate. </p>
<p>Unlike the rest of us, the royals cannot be fully private. Indeed, any insistence to the same right to privacy as the rest of us might even undermine the existence of the monarchy as an institution. Royal bodies are allowed to live privileged lives because, ultimately, they belong to their subjects.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221534/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Smith received funding from The British Academy. She is the Chair of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Rich received funding from The British Academy</span></em></p>
In the 18th century, managing public perceptions of the king’s fitness were as much about the health of the monarchy as they were about the health of monarch.
Lisa Smith, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Essex
Rachel Rich, Reader in Modern European History, Leeds Beckett University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/196729
2022-12-21T13:41:12Z
2022-12-21T13:41:12Z
FTX’s collapse mirrors an infamous 18th century British financial scandal
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502186/original/file-20221220-20-ou8jt2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=69%2C155%2C5113%2C3279&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sam Bankman-Fried, once considered a star in the freewheeling world of cryptocurrency, has been charged with conspiracy, fraud and money laundering.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/this-photo-illustration-shows-the-logo-of-cryptocurrency-news-photo/1244760361?phrase=sam bankman-fried&adppopup=true">Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2021/09/23/enron-scandal-revisited-20th-anniversary-legacy/">Enron</a>. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bernie-madoffs-ponzi-scheme-worked-2014-7">Bernie Madoff</a>. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/crypto/sam-bankman-fried-crypto-ftx-collapse-explained-rcna57582">FTX</a>.</p>
<p>In modern capitalism, it seems as if stories of companies and managers who engage in fraud and swindle their investors occur like the changing of the seasons. </p>
<p>In fact, these scandals can be traced back to the origins of publicly traded companies, when the first stockbrokers bought and sold company shares and government securities in the coffee houses of London’s Exchange Alley during the 1700s. </p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8b_mnWQAAAAJ&hl=en">As a historian of 18th century finance</a>, I am struck by the similarities between what’s known as the Charitable Corporation Scandal and the recent collapse of FTX. </p>
<h2>A noble cause</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110592139-010/html">Charitable Corporation</a> was established in London in 1707 with the noble mission of providing “relief of the industrious poor by assisting them with small sums at legal interest.”</p>
<p>Essentially, it sought to provide <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24429771#metadata_info_tab_contents">low-interest loans</a> to poor tradesmen, shielding them from predatory pawnbrokers who charged as much as 30% interest. The corporation made loans available at the rate of 5% in return for a pledge of property for security. </p>
<p>The Charitable Corporation was modeled on <a href="https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/25216/1/25216%20GATTO_Historical_Roots_of_Microcredit_and%20Usury_2018.pdf">Monti di Pietà</a>, a charitable institution of credit established in Catholic countries during the Renaissance era to combat <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/usury.asp">usury</a>, or high rates of interest. </p>
<p>Unlike the Monti di Pietà, however, the British version – despite its name – wasn’t a nonprofit. Instead, it was a business venture. The enterprise was funded by offering shares to investors who, in return, would make money while doing good. Under its original mission, it was like an 18th century version of today’s socially responsible investing, or “<a href="https://theconversation.com/sustainable-investment-is-it-worth-the-hype-heres-what-you-need-to-know-182533">sustainable investment funds</a>.” </p>
<h2>Raiding the fund</h2>
<p>In 1725, the Charitable Corporation diverted from its original mission when a new board of directors took over. </p>
<p>These men turned the corporation into their own piggy bank, taking money from it to buy shares and prop up their other companies. At the same time, the company’s employees began to engage in fraud: Safety checks ceased, books were kept irregularly and pledges went unrecorded. </p>
<p>Investigators would ultimately find that <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/642348549">£400,000</a> or more in capital was missing – roughly $108 million in today’s U.S. dollars. </p>
<p>In the autumn of 1731, rumors began to circulate about the solvency of the Charitable Corporation. The warehouse keeper at the time, <a href="https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/7034/page/1">John Thomson</a>, who was in charge of all loans and pledges but also in league with the five fraudulent directors, hid the company’s books and fled the country. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Print of man chopping down tree with people hanging from the branches." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502026/original/file-20221220-26-87nitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Let 'em be ruined so we are made,’ a man says in a 1734 satirical print criticizing the Charitable Corporation and its ties to government.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1868-0808-3573">© The Trustees of the British Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the shareholders’ quarterly meeting, they found that money, pledges and accounts had all gone missing. At this point, the proprietors of the Charitable Corporation stock appealed to the British Parliament for redress. One-third of those who petitioned were women, a proportion that equaled <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/5620">the percentage of women who held shares</a> in the Charitable Corporation. </p>
<p>Many women were drawn to the corporation because of its public mission in providing small loans to working people. It’s also possible that they had been intentionally targeted for fraud. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Report_with_the_Appendix_from_the_Co/aodhAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1">parliamentary investigation</a> led to various charges being leveled against both managers and employees of the Charitable Corporation. Many of them were forced to appear before Parliament and were arrested if they did not. The managers and employees deemed most responsible for the 1732 fraud, such as <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_True_and_Exact_Particular_and_Inventor/AvBbAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">William Burroughs</a>, had their assets seized and inventoried in order to help pay back the shareholder losses. </p>
<p>Bankruptcy proceedings were started against the banker and broker, George Robinson, and the warehouse keeper, Thomson. Both Sir Robert Sutton and <a href="https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1715-1754/member/grant-archibald-1696-1778">Sir Archibald Grant</a> were expelled as members of the House of Commons, with Grant being prevented from leaving the country and Sutton ultimately prosecuted in several courts.</p>
<p>In the end, the shareholders received a partial government bailout – Parliament authorized a <a href="https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-hist-proceedings/vol7/pp375-401">lottery</a> that reimbursed only 40% of what the corporation’s creditors had lost.</p>
<h2>The risks of concentrated power</h2>
<p>There are several key characteristics that stand out in the collapses of both the Charitable Corporation and FTX. Both companies were offering something new or venturing into a new sector. In the former’s case, it was microloans. In FTX’s case, it was cryptocurrency. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the management of both ventures was centralized in the hands of just a few people. The Charitable Corporation got into trouble when it reduced its directors from 12 to five and when it consolidated most of its loan business in the hands of one employee – namely, Thomson. FTX’s example is even more extreme, with founder Sam Bankman-Fried <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/22/ftx-delaware-bankruptcy-court-cryptocurrency-sam-bankman-fried">calling all the shots</a>. </p>
<p>In both cases, the key fraud was using the assets of one company to prop up another company managed by the same people. For example, in 1732, the corporation’s directors bought stock in the <a href="https://archive.org/details/yorkbuildingsco00murrgoog">York Buildings Company</a>, in which many of them were also involved. They hoped to juice stock prices. When that didn’t happen, they realized they couldn’t cover what they had taken out of the Charitable Corporation’s funds. </p>
<p>Fast forward nearly 300 years, and a similar story seems to have played out. Bankman-Fried allegedly <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/18/how-sam-bankman-fried-ran-8-billion-fraud-government-prosecutors.html">took money</a> out his customer accounts in FTX to cover his cryptocurrency trading firm, Alameda Research.</p>
<p>News of both frauds also came as a surprise, with little advance warning. Part of this is due to the ways in which managers were well respected and well connected to both politicians and the financial world. Few public figures mistrusted them, and this proved to be a useful screen for deceit. </p>
<p>I would also argue that in both cases the company’s connection to philanthropy lent it another level of cover. The Charitable Corporation’s very name announced its altruism. And even after the scandal subsided, commentators pointed out that the original business of microlending was useful. FTX’s founder Bankman-Fried is an advocate of <a href="https://theconversation.com/ftx-bankruptcy-is-bad-news-for-the-charities-that-crypto-mogul-sam-bankman-fried-generously-supported-194615">effective altruism</a> and has argued that it was useful for him and his companies to make lots of money so he could give it away to what he deemed effective causes.</p>
<p>After the Charitable Corporation’s collapse in 1732, Parliament didn’t institute any regulation that would prevent such a fraud from happening again. </p>
<p>A tradition of loose oversight and regulations has been the hallmark of Anglo-American capitalism. If the response to the 2008 financial crash is any indication of what will come in the wake of FTX’s collapse, it’s possible that some bad actors, like Bankman-Fried, will be punished. But any <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/09/uk-announces-major-overhaul-of-its-financial-sector-in-attempt-to-spur-growth.html">regulation will be undone at the first opportunity</a> – or never put in place to begin with.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196729/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Froide receives funding from the Henry E. Huntington Library. </span></em></p>
In the Charitable Corporation Scandal, a group of politically connected directors leveraged the company’s altruistic image to attract investors – before raiding the funds to prop up other ventures.
Amy Froide, Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/185947
2022-07-06T12:21:16Z
2022-07-06T12:21:16Z
Abortion decision cherry-picks history – when the US Constitution was ratified, women had much more autonomy over abortion decisions than during 19th century
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472094/original/file-20220701-16-bcmnaz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C3%2C1020%2C797&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ben Franklin, center, inserted an abortion recipe in a popular textbook he republished in 1748.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/benjamin-franklin-and-associates-at-franklins-printing-news-photo/525372985?adppopup=true">GraphicaArtis/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Justice Samuel Alito appears spellbound by the 19th century. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf">Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</a>, the decision Alito wrote overruling 50 years of <a href="https://theconversation.com/supreme-court-overturns-roe-upends-50-years-of-abortion-rights-5-essential-reads-on-what-happens-next-184697">constitutional protection for women’s right to get an abortion</a>, he deploys arguments that are based on several historical precedents. He uses the phrase “history and tradition” regularly. </p>
<p>But for Alito, the 19th century looks like the true golden age: “In 1803, the British Parliament <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf">made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy</a> and authorized the imposition of severe punishment.”</p>
<p>He goes on and on: “In this country during the 19th century, the vast majority of the States enacted statutes criminalizing abortion at all stages of pregnancy.”</p>
<p>“By 1868, the year when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified,” Alito concludes, “three-quarters of the States, 28 out of 37, had enacted statutes making abortion a crime.”</p>
<p>But in his rather selective forays into history, Alito doesn’t ask what <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/maurizio-valsania-1098422">to me, as a historian</a>, constitutes a set of fundamental questions: Why was abortion eventually criminalized during that time? What was the broad cultural and intellectual context of that period? And, more important, is there something peculiar about the 19th century?</p>
<p>As far as women’s bodies and abortion are concerned, the 19th century saw a decrease in the trust in, and power of, women themselves.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An aged title page for a book, 'Domestic Medicine.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1303&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1303&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472084/original/file-20220701-20-4cpdoi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1303&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Buchan’s book ‘Domestic Medicine,’ first published in 1769 and found in many American homes, contained instructions for an abortion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlmuid-2544046R-bk">National Library of Medicine</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>18th-century woman: Active and in control</h2>
<p>To begin with, 17th- and 18th-century legal authorities <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4556&context=buffalolawreview">Edward Coke</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Matthew-Hale">Matthew Hale</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blackstone">William Blackstone</a> had all advocated for or condoned abortion. They fretted only when the procedure was carried out after “<a href="https://origins.osu.edu/article/commonplace-controversial-different-histories-abortion-europe-and-united-states?language_content_entity=en">quickening,” the moment when the mother realizes that the fetus moves in her womb</a>, approximately the fourth month of pregnancy.</p>
<p>As a medical procedure, <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/abortion-in-america-the-origins-and-evolution-of-national-policy-1800-1900/oclc/72092223">abortion was widespread</a> in Colonial and 18th-century America. By using more or less safe techniques, midwives and medical practitioners performed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1300/j013v04n02_05">many types of operations</a> on their patients. The woman could easily die, of course; but when she sought an abortion, no social, legal or religious force would have blocked her.</p>
<p>Also, a woman could choose from many available remedies rather than have an operation. Derived from juniper bushes, “<a href="https://pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=juniperus%20sabina">savin</a>,” or <em>Juniperus sabina</em>, was one of the most popular abortifacients. Other herbs and concoctions were similarly taken: <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937996">pennyroyal</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1300/J013v04n02_05">tansy, ergot, Seneca snakeroot</a> or <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/womens-life-and-work-in-the-southern-colonies/oclc/519060">cotton root bark</a>.</p>
<p>Benjamin Franklin inserted an abortion recipe <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%22Advice%20to%20a%20Young%20Tradesman%22&s=1511311111&r=1">in a popular textbook</a> he <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ben-franklin-american-instructor-textbook-abortion-recipe.html?fbclid=IwAR0M-wH0zmIEL9caXPLcNw7PaNkXL0NLSN4PXdtRPBt_AbhonX7SCVX5JYg">republished in Philadelphia</a> in 1748. He didn’t prompt any scandal.</p>
<p>The truth is that America’s founders, together with their contemporaries, <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-womens-bodies/oclc/52288256?referer=di&ht=edition">had a rather democratic understanding of the female body</a>. They believed that women, physiologically speaking, weren’t qualitatively different from men; the two sexes were equal and complementary.</p>
<p>Men’s and women’s composition, medical doctors argued, was <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25407-1">identical</a> in essence – the only difference was anatomical, in that male sexual organs were more externally distended than female organs.</p>
<p>Just like the male, the female was thought of as fully in control of the workings of her physiology, including her sexuality. It was believed that both the man and the woman had to reach orgasm, better if simultaneously, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4330669">for pregnancy to ensue</a>.</p>
<p>This made 18th-century men attentive to the satisfaction of their female partners, though for utilitarian reasons. </p>
<p>Especially when sex was aimed at procreation, the woman had to be as active as the male partner. The 18th-century woman was active and in control. She trusted her bodily feelings, including her pleasures. </p>
<p>And crucially, only she could detect whether quickening had taken place in her womb. Consequently, she could immediately tell whether terminating a pregnancy at a given time was acceptable. Or if it was a crime.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An antique magazine cover with a woman's image on it, holding a baby." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472089/original/file-20220701-13-msgk37.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">19th-century American abortionist Ann Trow Lohman, who performed abortions in New York City and was referred to by one anti-abortion advocate as ‘the monster in human shape.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Restell#/media/File:National_Police_Gazette_Restell.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>19th-century woman: Weak and chaste</h2>
<p>The 19th century changed all that. The understanding of physiology and the mechanisms of the female body underwent a deep transformation. European and American doctors, now, saw women as essentially different from men: From a “one body” model, the medical discourse shifted toward <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/physician-and-sexuality-in-victorian-america/oclc/964207">a “two body” model</a>.</p>
<p>Women’s level of self-determination decreased accordingly. Suddenly, they were not only weaker or softer than men, but inherently passive, too. Instead of being encouraged to take part in sex, actively and with vigor, 19th-century women were <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674543553">expected to be withdrawn</a>.</p>
<p>They were thus recast as pure, chaste and modest. Commendable women were virgins, wives, mothers. Or else they were prostitutes, nearly criminals, which reflects the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the-19th-century">Victorian dualistic mindset</a>. Instead of being urged to trust the quickening and other physiological events happening in her womb or her vagina, the honest woman had to trust her doctor.</p>
<p>Anti-abortion campaigns began in earnest in the mid-19th century. They were waged <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exploring-the-complicated-history-of-abortion-in-the-united-states">mostly by the American Medical Association</a>, founded in 1847, and were <a href="https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft967nb5z5&chunk.id=d0e195&toc.id=&brand=ucpress">fundamentally anti-feminist</a>. They chastised women for shunning the Victorian “self-sacrifice” expected of mothers.</p>
<p>Anti-abortion campaigns were <a href="https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft967nb5z5&chunk.id=d0e195&toc.id=&brand=ucpress">targeted against midwives and tried to discredit women’s firsthand experience</a> of pregnancy. Male doctors claimed pregnancy as a medical terrain - a realm that belonged to them exclusively.</p>
<p>Based on women’s own bodily sensations – not on medical diagnosis – quickening was denigrated. Quickening, of course, made doctors dependent on women’s self-diagnosis and judgment. Dr. Horatio R. Storer, the leader of the medical campaigns against abortion, described quickening as “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65701">in fact but a sensation</a>.” In such a context, it could no longer be framed as the basis from where all moral, social and legal standards emerged.</p>
<p>In the Dobbs decision, Alito says: “The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” This is a historical fact: Protection of the right to abortion wasn’t around in America before Roe.</p>
<p>But it is also an incomplete picture of the full story. The criminalization of abortion, plus the decentralization of the woman’s experience, plus the medicalization of her feelings that led to that decision, are facets that belong to the long-gone 19th century.</p>
<p>No American lives in that century any more - not even Justice Alito.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/185947/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maurizio Valsania does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A scholar of 18th-century America and the founders analyzes the Supreme Court opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion, which he says relies on an incomplete version of US history.
Maurizio Valsania, Professor of American History, Università di Torino
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/180980
2022-04-08T12:02:29Z
2022-04-08T12:02:29Z
Bridgerton: the real 18th-century writers who used pseudonyms to stoke controversy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457120/original/file-20220408-19-347jjl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=60%2C24%2C2298%2C1110&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the hit Netflix series Bridgerton, London society is set alight thanks to a newsletter penned by an anonymous writer whose sharp pen captures all the pomp, circumstance and gossip of the season. Fans of Bridgerton will recognise this writer, Lady Whistledown, as an integral part of the show. For viewers, she serves as our narrator. For characters, she is known as the pseudonymous author of the salacious gossip newsletter, Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers – making and breaking fortunes with each issue. </p>
<p>The invention of fictional “editors” to narrate similar publications was a tactic really used by 18th-century journalists and these editors could take any form, from a cantankerous Scotsman to a cosmopolitan green parrot.</p>
<p>Although the Lady Whistledown persona is designed to protect the papers’ secret author, she clearly takes on a distinctive life of her own. This is emphasised by the casting of Julie Andrews as the voice of the newsletter. This unique character is foregrounded further in the second season when, even after the true identity of the author has been revealed, Andrews continues to narrate the show and read the contents of the paper as Lady Whistledown. All of these dynamics are recognisable in the periodical press of the 1700s.</p>
<h2>The Tatler</h2>
<p>At the dawn of the 18th century, London society was flooded with cheap print. A highly popular form of cheap print was the literary periodical, which would usually contain a single essay and appear once or twice weekly. These essays typically contained opinions on whatever was the subject of the periodical, and there were periodicals on everything, including politics, fashion, culture and more often than not, gossip.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qYNCws-a6CQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/30/hipster-coffee-shops-300-years">These periodicals were read in coffee houses and private clubs</a>, which also provided some of the 18th-century’s best remembered periodicals with their subject matter. In 1709, for example, Richard Steele launched The Tatler. It was a periodical <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13645">that promised</a> to “to expose the false arts of life, to pull the disguise of cunning, vanity and affectation, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse and our behaviour”.</p>
<p>Like the secret author of Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers, Steele was taking on a fashionable society he was himself very much a part of. His solution was to write not as himself, but as the fictional Scottish astrologer Issac Bickerstaff.</p>
<p>Bickerstaff was actually invented a year earlier by Jonathan Swift as part of <a href="https://theconversation.com/titania-mcgrath-twitter-parody-of-wokeness-owes-a-lot-to-satirists-of-the-18th-century-113312">a year-long hoax at the expense of quack astrologer John Partridge</a>. Steele was able to incorporate Bickerstaff’s characteristics into his own paper, while also signalling to readers the tone and approach he wished to take: one of playful, self-mocking irony and gentle satire.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Photocopy of an old pamphlet." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457113/original/file-20220408-15-latd9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457113/original/file-20220408-15-latd9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457113/original/file-20220408-15-latd9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457113/original/file-20220408-15-latd9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457113/original/file-20220408-15-latd9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457113/original/file-20220408-15-latd9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457113/original/file-20220408-15-latd9i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Tatler’s editor was the fictional Scottish astrologer Issac Bickerstaff.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatler_(1709_journal)#/media/File:The_Tatler.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Spectating society</h2>
<p>The term coined by 18th-century scholars for this fictional editorial voice used in periodical writing is “<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Performing_Authorship_in_Eighteenth_cent/f7QpDKgM5FQC?hl=en">eidolon</a>”. Eidolons acted as an equivalent of what we might now recognise as a publication’s house style. </p>
<p>Readers would get to know these eidolons and in doing so come to recognise the tone and topics these periodicals would adopt. At the same time, it made it easier for other writers to contribute essays without compromising a periodical’s consistency. For instance, Steele was soon joined on The Tatler by Joseph Addison, who would similarly write essays as Bickerstaff.</p>
<p>Addison and Steele also collaborated on the most famous periodical of the 18th-century, The Spectator, which ran between 1711 and 1712 (the current magazine of the same name was inspired by this periodical). They wrote in this periodical as Mr Spectator, an aloof observer of mankind whose <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030">ambition</a> was to bring “philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses”.</p>
<p>Decades later, <a href="https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/63">literary polymath Eliza Haywood</a> pushed the boundaries of what an eidolon could be. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Illustration featuring four young women" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457114/original/file-20220408-20-4ewb3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457114/original/file-20220408-20-4ewb3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1014&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457114/original/file-20220408-20-4ewb3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1014&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457114/original/file-20220408-20-4ewb3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1014&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457114/original/file-20220408-20-4ewb3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1275&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457114/original/file-20220408-20-4ewb3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1275&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457114/original/file-20220408-20-4ewb3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1275&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The frontispiece of the first issue of The Female Spectator features its four fictional editors.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Haywood#/media/File:Houghton_EC7.H3362.746f_-_Female_Spectator.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1747, Haywood launched The Female Spectator, a periodical loosely modelled on Addison and Steele’s original, but addressed explicitly to women. Haywood adopted not one but <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Female_Spectator/NeFGb79R_XoC?hl=en">four eidolons</a>: the chief editor, a beautiful and unmarried young woman, a happily married woman, and a “Widow of Quality”. </p>
<p>In 1746, Haywood took her experimentation even further and launched The Parrot, a periodical voiced by a non-human eidolon: a green parrot from Java. The parrot, who was taken from his home at a young age and shipped around the world by various owners before winding up in London, looked askance at behaviour he witnessed from his cage and openly championed the causes of the marginalised, be they women, supporters of the exiled Stuart king James II, or slaves.</p>
<p>The legacy of these literary periodicals and their curious eidolons goes far beyond the use of house styles in journalism today. They also played a role in the development of more explicitly <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Commerce_of_Everyday_Life.html?id=9xO0QgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">literary forms, such as the short story and the novel</a>, as both authors and readers learnt to engage with the notion of psychologically complex fictional constructs.</p>
<p>And, of course, we also see their legacy in Bridgerton. And as in Bridgerton, it was not often that these authors protected their anonymity for long (in many instances, their identity was an open secret all along). However, this rarely damaged readers’ affections for their eidolons in the long-term. So, even if we all now know who she really is, long live Lady Whistledown.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180980/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam J Smith works for York St John University and is affiliated with the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. </span></em></p>
From editors looking to ‘expose the false art of life’ to others taking up the cause of the marginalised, writers went anonymous to share their uncomfortable truths.
Adam J Smith, Associate Professor in 18th-century Literature, York St John University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/168311
2021-09-21T10:41:42Z
2021-09-21T10:41:42Z
The Prince – the great tradition of satirising the royal family is under threat as they become more ‘human’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/422192/original/file-20210920-14371-a38tvm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1914%2C1074&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pressroom.warnermedia.com/na/image/prncs1ep0111screengrab94a">HBO Max.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The adult animated satire, <a href="https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/british-royal-family-series-hbo-max-the-prince-1203474443/">The Prince</a>, has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/30/the-prince-royal-hbo-series-backlash/">sparked outrage</a> for its portrayal of the British royal family as a mob of hyper-privileged halfwits, hopelessly out of touch with contemporary society. They are led by Queen Elizabeth II, imagined here as a bling-coated mafia boss. </p>
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<iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/the-prince-the-great-tradition-of-satirising-the-royal-family-is-under-threat-as-they-become-more-human-168311&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p>The Telegraph described the show as “<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/hbos-prince-hollywoods-insult-royal-family-disgusting-puerile/">grossly offensive</a>”. While <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/30/the-prince-royal-hbo-series-backlash/">The Washington Post</a> reported that a torrent of complaints labelled it “wrong”, “disgusting” and guilty of fuelling “hatred toward Britain’s royals”.</p>
<p>But The Prince is far from the first instance of satire to poke fun at the royal family – nor is it the most biting in this 300-year-old tradition. </p>
<p>In many ways, royal figures are the perfect subjects for satire. Traditionally, the satirist seeks to reveal and skewer stupidity, ridiculousness and hypocrisy and, in most cases, speak truth to power. This process inevitably constitutes “punching up”. This means targeting those with more privilege and a higher status in society than the satirist.</p>
<p>However, in recent years the royals have been rebranded as vulnerable, despite their enormous privilege. This change might have significant consequences for the art of satire.</p>
<h2>Punching up</h2>
<p>The royal family’s position at the top of British society makes them an obvious satirical target. Perceptions of the royal family as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/britain-royal-family-prince-charles-monarchy">antiquated and politically redundant</a>, despite their immense fortune and revered status, are fertile material for satirists seeking to lampoon ridiculousness and hypocrisy.</p>
<p>For as long as the royals were seen as aloof, untroubled and of a different breed from the commoners over whom they ruled, satirists haven’t needed to concern themselves with questions about the harm such satire might do to the royal family as “real” people.</p>
<p>In fact in the 18th century, when satire of the royals was at its most scathing, scandalous and scatological (there was a lot of poo involved), it drew little attention from the monarchy.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Cartoon depicting a king receiving news on the toilet." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/422194/original/file-20210920-17-5g7ro5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/422194/original/file-20210920-17-5g7ro5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/422194/original/file-20210920-17-5g7ro5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/422194/original/file-20210920-17-5g7ro5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/422194/original/file-20210920-17-5g7ro5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/422194/original/file-20210920-17-5g7ro5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/422194/original/file-20210920-17-5g7ro5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taking_physick_-_-_or_-_the_news_of_shooting_the_King_of_Sweden!_by_James_Gillray.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During this period, caricaturist James Gillray would regularly produce images of George III and his wife defecating. He also drew Queen Charlotte <a href="https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_9/29_15/0c0e95b2_b364_451c_a4b6_a3b500fdc91a/mid_00138580_001.jpg">haggard and naked</a>, and their son George IV as a sexually ravenous libertine <a href="http://www.tara.tcd.ie/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2262/10007/ROB1016.JPG?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">emerging from beneath a woman’s skirts</a>. Nevertheless, James Gillray was still granted a government pension. </p>
<p>The monarchy’s tolerance of such satire spoke to their strength. They were so secure in their position of power that they were untroubled by cheap jokes and toilet humour. There are even cases where the monarchy <a href="https://theconversation.com/spitting-image-a-warning-from-the-golden-age-of-satire-124546">directly benefited from such satirical abuses</a>.</p>
<h2>Royal targets or real people?</h2>
<p>Since the 18th century, royal satire has broadly shifted from the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Juvenalian-satire">Juvenalian mode</a> (satire that is bitter, ironic, contemptuous, relentlessly extreme in its censure) to the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Horatian-satire">Horatian</a> (satire that is amused, tolerant and wry). </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7GvHVCguMS0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The latter is well exemplified by Harry Enfield’s The Windsors, which pokes gentle fun at royals, who are presented as dim-witted and detached, but ultimately harmless. It is to this Horatian tradition that The Prince is most openly indebted, with the show’s creator, Gary Janetti, even claiming that the show “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/30/the-prince-royal-hbo-series-backlash/">is meant with affection</a>”.</p>
<p>Though royal satire has become less scathing over time, it seems that audiences and critics have become more sensitive to jibes at this ruling elite, as the reception to The Prince demonstrates. </p>
<p>In some areas of the media, there is great concern that making fun of the monarchy might cause irreparable damage – that satire is in some way harmful to great tradition. More than anything, this perhaps speaks to the monarchy’s existential precarity when a light-hearted adult cartoon causes more concern to the crown than images of defecation, nudity and sexual promiscuity did 200 years ago.</p>
<p>The aspect of The Prince that has drawn the most fire is the decision to centre events around young Prince George, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9851387/Animated-satire-Prince-criticised-mocking-Duke-Edinburgh.html">with the Daily Mail</a> suggesting that children should be off-limits for satire.</p>
<p>Whether you agree, however, depends on whether you view George as the target of the show’s satire or its vehicle. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jGxOken3-lc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>There is a rich tradition of child characters being used in satirical fiction to draw attention to the hypocrisies, inconsistencies and contradictions of the adult world. For example, Evelyn Waugh’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/571/57153/a-handful-of-dust/9780241341100.html">A Handful of Dust</a> (1934) features a child who is able to decode the true meaning behind the words of adults and immediately shares them in entertainingly blunt statements. A more recent example is Family Guy’s precocious Stewie Griffin – a character The Prince’s young George seems, in many ways, to recall.</p>
<p>The biggest problem faced by The Prince is that many members of the royal family no longer present themselves as aloof, but have instead come to be understood in language associated with popular cultural discussions, such as those surrounding racism and mental health. </p>
<p>Prince William and Prince Harry have both spoken openly about the loss of their mother, Diana and the <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/prince-harry-on-his-mental-health-struggles-and-processing-his-mothers-death">effect this had on their mental health</a>. Harry and Meghan’s interview with <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/oprah-winfrey-interviews-meghan-markle-prince-harry/">Oprah Winfrey</a> in March 2021 touched on questions of race, gender and suicidal thoughts. </p>
<p>Both Princes have also been involved with charities <a href="https://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/campaigns/heads-together/#:%7E:text=Led%20by%20the%20Duke%20and,important%20conversations%20about%20mental%20health">raising awareness of mental health</a>. When younger members of the royal family, at least, become humanised in this way, satire on the institution as a whole becomes more complex. It might seem that the more the family appears to be made up of “real people”, the more distasteful satire directed at them appears to some commentators.</p>
<p>Given this new climate, where those figures at the top of society are able to position themselves as vulnerable, “punching up” is no longer as easy to justify.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/168311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Royal satire has softened over the last 300 years, but audiences are more sensitive to barbs against the institution.
Adam J Smith, Senior Lecturer in 18th-century Literature, York St John University
Jo Waugh, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, York St John University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/166085
2021-08-30T12:32:04Z
2021-08-30T12:32:04Z
Drink less, exercise more and take in the air – sage advice on pandemic living from a long-forgotten, and very long, 18th-century poem
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418083/original/file-20210826-21-nuzj2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4526%2C3508&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Disease and public health confusion were common in 18th-century England.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/coloured-engraving-depicting-james-phipps-becoming-the-news-photo/526776644">adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A respiratory disease has spread far and wide. Conflicts at home and abroad pose dire challenges. The public is overwhelmed by questions of what to read and whom to trust as it confronts an ever more complicated world.</p>
<p>I am describing mid-18th century Britain. The first disease to be characterized in English as an “<a href="https://www.doi.org/10.3201/eid1201.ET1201">influenza</a>” swept through Europe in 1743. <a href="https://militarymaps.rct.uk/the-maps">Foreign war</a>, as well as violent domestic struggles, had marked political life for much of the prior century and would continue for many years to come. And increasing rates of <a href="https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/themes/language-and-ideas">literacy and publication</a> meant that information – good, bad and ugly – was more available than ever before. </p>
<p>This was the world that in 1744 saw the publication of “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Preserving_Health_a_Poem_Pric/xydEAQAAMAAJ?hl=en">The Art of Preserving Health</a>,” a long poem by the Scottish poet-physician John Armstrong that takes up a range of topics people today would refer to collectively as “wellness.” Over 2,000 lines long, the poem is divided into four books: “Air,” “Diet,” “Exercise” and “The Passions.” </p>
<p>During the past year and a half, many readers have turned to <a href="https://theconversation.com/shipwrecked-how-social-isolation-can-enrich-our-spiritual-lives-like-robinson-crusoe-135133">age-old texts</a> to imagine <a href="https://theconversation.com/medieval-medical-books-could-hold-the-recipe-for-new-antibiotics-74490">new paths forward</a>. As <a href="https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/english/faculty/melissa_schoenberger">a teacher and scholar</a> of 18th-century poetry, I find it useful to think about John Armstrong in this way too. So, while the world waits for vaccination rates to rise and case counts to fall, perhaps a few of this doctor’s orders are worth noting. </p>
<h2>A prolific poet-physician</h2>
<p>Armstrong lived and wrote in London, having moved there in the 1730s with a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh. In addition to “The Art of Preserving Health,” he wrote and translated <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Synopsis_of_the_History_and_Cure_of_Ve/T6hkAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">serious medical texts</a>, a volume of <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Economy_of_Love_by_Dr_John_Armstrong/sUFWAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=John+armstrong&printsec=frontcover">sexual health advice in verse</a> and <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Essay_for_Abridging_the_Study_of_Phys/uElpAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=inauthor:%22John+ARMSTRONG+(Physician+and+Poet.)%22&printsec=frontcover">satirical works</a> sending up xenophobia, superstition and medical quacks. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Depiction of 18th century physician and poet John Armstrong" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/418085/original/file-20210826-19-b86b03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Armstrong, 18th-century Scottish physician and poet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/john-armstrong-18th-century-scottish-physician-and-poet-news-photo/463986855">The Print Collector/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of course, by the standards of modern science, even serious 18th-century medicine tends to look like quackery. For instance, no one would take mercury to cure syphilis these days – though as the historian Roy Porter put it, the general lack of good options for treatment tended to mean that the public would “<a href="https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/quack-medicine-georgian-england">try anything</a>.” But Armstrong appears to have been especially put off by those who would prioritize profit over public health.</p>
<p>Immediately popular, “The Art of Preserving Health” remained in print for decades, with editions produced in London, Philadelphia, Boston and Naples, Italy. As late as 1822, a short <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Poems_of_Armstrong_and_Johnson_The_L/OSNYAAAAcAAJ?q=&gbpv=1&bsq=%22sink%20into%20oblivion%22#f=false">biography</a> of Armstrong insisted that “there is no probability that his poem will ever sink into oblivion.” </p>
<p>Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. Tastes eventually turned away from texts that seemed to combine disciplines like literature and medicine. Even John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Penny_Cyclopaedia_of_the_Society_for/5Q5CAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=knight+penny+cyclopaedia&printsec=frontcover">was criticized</a> by some education reformers who found its incorporation of religious, historical and classical ideas to be outside the bounds of good poetry. </p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Another barrier to the survival of “The Art of Preserving Health” was its language. Like many 18th-century poets, Armstrong signals his seriousness by trying to sound like both Milton and famous ancient poets like the Roman writer Virgil. This kind of writing eventually fell out of favor, and to a 21st-century ear, it can sound a little funny. For instance, when describing the discomforts of high humidity, Armstrong observes that “the spungy air/ For ever weeps” – not inaccurate, yet probably not how any serious poet would put it today. But if we let go of our modern expectations for what a poem should be or do – and perhaps keep a good dictionary close by – we find that much of Armstrong’s advice holds up. </p>
<h2>Poetic prescriptions</h2>
<p>First, and perhaps most relevant in the age of COVID-19, Armstrong prescribes fresh air or, in his words, a “kindly sky” in a “woodland scene where nature smiles,” away from dense crowds. This clean air, he writes, alleviates all kinds of diseases, especially respiratory infections. </p>
<p>Next, he’d like his readers to think about what they eat. Armstrong suggests a “watchful appetite” to help rebuild oneself from the wear and tear of everyday stresses, but he avoids naming specific foods: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code>I could relate ... the various powers,
Of various foods: But fifty years would roll,
And fifty more before the tale was done.
</code></pre>
<p>Instead, like a modern nutritionist, he advises a keen awareness of one’s own food sensitivities, as well as a general sense of moderation. </p>
<p>Later, he recommends physical activity: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code>Begin with gentle toils; and, as your nerves
Grow firm, to hardier by just steps aspire.
The prudent, even in every moderate walk,
At first but saunter; and by slow degrees
Increase their pace.
</code></pre>
<p>In other words, workouts should start easy and gradually ramp up. Even experienced athletes begin with a warmup, and Armstrong prescribes the same — “at first but saunter” — before kicking it into high gear. </p>
<p>And finally, he’d like readers to be aware of “the most important health,/ That of the mind.” His advice on drunkenness is particularly resonant in light of recent concerns about <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22942">increased alcohol consumption in quarantine</a>: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code>[I]t wounds you sore to recollect
What follies in your loose unguarded hour
Escap’d. For one irrevocable word,
Perhaps that meant no harm, you lose a friend.
Or in the rage of wine your hasty hand
Performs a deed to haunt you to the grave.
Add that your means, your health, your parts decay;
Your friends avoid you; brutishly transform’d
They hardly know you.
</code></pre>
<p>That is, beware the effects of one drink too many. But Armstrong isn’t merely trying to ruin the fun. He makes lots of other suggestions about how to care for one’s emotional health. My favorite one arrives at the very end of the poem, when Armstrong prescribes a healthy dose of music: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code>Music exalts each Joy, allays each Grief,
Expels Diseases, softens every Pain,
Subdues the rage of Poison, and the Plague[.]
</code></pre>
<p>Today, medical experts can offer more options for treatment than Armstrong ever could have imagined. But health care workers past and present will likely always have in common the challenge of keeping the public informed, engaged and well.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166085/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Melissa Schoenberger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The 2,000-line poem by Scottish physician John Armstrong was written during a time of pandemic, war and increasing public disinformation. What can readers learn from it today?
Melissa Schoenberger, Associate Professor of English, College of the Holy Cross
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/164214
2021-08-09T12:29:05Z
2021-08-09T12:29:05Z
Taxing bachelors and proposing marriage lotteries – how superpowers addressed declining birthrates in the past
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415008/original/file-20210806-25-577w61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=172%2C275%2C5559%2C3361&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In England, children were seen as a way to replenish the military and sustain the economy.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-a-family-during-the-stuart-period-by-an-unknown-news-photo/543540010?adppopup=true">Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s growing awareness – and concern – about <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57003722">declining birthrates</a> in the U.S. and other countries around the world.</p>
<p>Falling birth rates are usually seen as a sign of societal decline, a nation’s diminishing power, and the eclipse of marriage and family values. Rarely are they put into any kind of historical context. But birthrates are cyclical <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-complete-gapminder">and have gone up and down throughout history</a>.</p>
<p>While some people might assume that the decision to have a child is a personal or private one, individuals and couples also respond to external forces. Economic, social and cultural factors heavily influence birth rates. <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8b_mnWQAAAAJ&hl=en">As a historian</a> who has researched <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270606.001.0001/acprof-9780199270606">the uptick of single people</a> in the 17th and 18th centuries, I’m familiar with how governments and societies have traditionally responded to low marriage and birthrates with various persuasion techniques. </p>
<p>In the 1690s, England and France entered into <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/second-hundred-years-war/m02rgdp0?hl=en">a 120-year period of continuous hot and cold warfare</a>. The two nations were also superpowers that engaged in trade, established colonies and fought wars on multiple continents. </p>
<p>Maintaining healthy population numbers was a top concern, seen as a crucial element for ensuring economic and military might. So each country advanced a number of <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pronatalist">pronatalist</a> strategies to encourage marriage and births.</p>
<h2>Marriage loses its luster</h2>
<p>In the 17th century – a period when marriage and fertility were more closely connected than they are today – the English were primarily concerned about low marriage rates. </p>
<p>Demographic historians E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/british-history-after-1450/population-history-england-15411871?format=PB&isbn=9780521356886">reconstructed England’s population trends from 1541 to 1871</a> to show how, thanks to a relatively late age at first marriage and high rates of people who never married, birthrates in England declined. From 1600 to 1750 the average Englishwoman did not marry until age 26 and the average man at age 28. This age at first marriage began to fall only after 1750 with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. </p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, anywhere from 13% to 27% of those English people born between 1575 and 1700 never married. This was highest in the last decades of the 17th century. </p>
<p>Various factors account for the high percentage of people never marrying: war, colonization and outbreaks of illnesses, <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Great-Plague">such as the plague</a>. Literature from England’s Restoration also reveals a negative attitude toward marriage among elite men.</p>
<p>So when the English government passed the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_Duty_Act_1695">Marriage Duty Act</a> in 1695 to raise money to fight the French, it simultaneously addressed revenue needs and fertility concerns. </p>
<p>The marriage duty tax levied fees on births, marriages and deaths. But it also gave people an incentive to get married by taxing bachelors over the age of 25 and childless widowers. Women weren’t usually taxed because the government assumed men were largely behind the decline in marriage.</p>
<h2>Pushing spinsters into motherhood</h2>
<p>Cultural pressure also served to persuade or encourage women to marry. </p>
<p>Emerging at the same time as the marriage duty tax were the first literary and visual depictions of the “old maid” archetype, a portrayal of never-married women that was always disparaging. </p>
<p>A classic example is William Hogarth’s print “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Times_of_the_Day">Morning</a>” from his “Four Times of the Day” series. It features a censorious, unpartnered, unattractive woman who is deemed to be past her prime.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A haggard woman with a pockmarked face observes attractive couples." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412287/original/file-20210720-21-z1eq3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Hogarth’s ‘Morning’ depicts an unmarried woman in an unflattering light.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/dp/original/DP827065.jpg">The Metropolitan Museum of Art</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Literary satirists also suggested marital lotteries to partner off undesirable spinsters. A 1710 proposal for “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/love-lottery-or-a-woman-the-prize-being-a-pleasant-new-invention-where-any-maid-or-widdow-that-puts-in-ten-shillings-shall-be-sure-of-a-husband-and-perhaps-five-hundred-pound-to-her-portion-there-being-above-twenty-prizes-to-one-blank-with-the-same-chance-to-batchelors-or-widdowers-to-be-drawn-on-midsummer-day-next-also-an-office-of-intelligence-to-be-kept-at-the-same-place-where-any-maid-or-widdow-batchelor-or-widdower-may-enter-their-names-fortunes-and-characters-and-be-advisd-of-suitable-matches-in-a-very-little-time-without-any-manner-of-trouble-the-like-never-before-publishd/oclc/642587287">The Love Lottery: Or, a Woman the Prize</a>” responded directly to the marriage duty tax. The author proclaimed that instead of taxing marriages “they shou’d have propos’d to help’d ‘em to Matches.” He suggested a lottery in which “maids and widows” could venture 10 shillings and the prize would be a husband or a dowry. </p>
<p>This proposal was <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767985.001.0001/acprof-9780198767985">one of many that appeared between the 1690s and 1730s</a>. For example, 1734’s “A Bill for a Charitable Lottery for the Relief of the Distressed Virgins in Great Britain” stated that “for the necessary encouragement of propagation, which we ought particularly to attend to upon the prospect of an approaching war, that all the Virgins in Great Britain from 15 to 40 should be disposed of [gotten rid of] by lottery.” </p>
<p>Although framed as prospective legislation, the proposed bill appeared in print only.</p>
<h2>Saving babies for France</h2>
<p>France differed from England by focusing more directly on increasing births. Although French writers contemplated various reasons for what they perceived to be low birthrates, high infant mortality was seen as a major issue.</p>
<p>In the 1750s Parisian midwife <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang%C3%A9lique_du_Coudray#/media/File:Ang%C3%A9lique_du_Courdray.jpg">Madame du Coudray</a> capitalized on the French government’s pronatal stance and <a href="https://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/2013/08/07/madame-du-coudray-a-midwife-in-a-mans-world/">offered her services to Louis XV</a> to train the country’s midwives in order to improve France’s live birth rates. </p>
<p>Du Coudray, herself unmarried and biologically childless, reproduced something else for France: what she called <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Machine_de_Madame_du_Coudray-Mus%C3%A9e_de_l%27Homme.jpg">her machine</a> – and what we might call a mannequin – on which midwives could practice different techniques used during difficult or dangerous births. Historian Nina Gelbart estimates that du Coudray and her disciples trained <a href="https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1g5004dk;query=;brand=ucpress">tens of thousands of midwives in successful delivery techniques</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A dummy child attached to a model woman via an umbilical cord." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414877/original/file-20210805-27-2mbp24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=580%2C625%2C3809%2C2330&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414877/original/file-20210805-27-2mbp24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414877/original/file-20210805-27-2mbp24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414877/original/file-20210805-27-2mbp24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414877/original/file-20210805-27-2mbp24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414877/original/file-20210805-27-2mbp24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414877/original/file-20210805-27-2mbp24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">France’s ‘national midwife,’ Madame du Coudray, invented an instructional mannequin to improve birthrates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/zigazou76/8665628775">Frédéric Bisson/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Pronatalism today</h2>
<p>Substitute 21st-century U.S. and China for 18th-century England and France and you’ll see the same sort of handwringing over birthrates in these two nations today. </p>
<p>In both countries, a resurgence of policies aimed at getting people to have more babies has already begun. China ended its one-child policy in 2016. After a disappointingly low jump in birthrates, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57303592">it has recently begun to encourage three-child families</a>. </p>
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<p>It’s unlikely the U.S. will see the equivalent of a national midwife like du Coudray – or, <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/7774485/czars_in_the_white_house">to use today’s parlance</a>, a “reproduction czar.” But the U.S. Congress <a href="https://theconversation.com/biden-administrations-39-billion-child-care-strategy-5-questions-answered-159119">is finally talking seriously about increasing funding for child care</a>. And beginning in July 2021, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-families-with-kids-are-getting-monthly-payments-from-the-government-4-essential-reads-164467">the IRS started issuing monthly child tax credit checks</a> to most parents in the U.S. </p>
<p>Today’s policies are more of a carrot than the stick approach pursued by England with its marriage duty tax; instead of taxing bachelors to encourage marriage, the U.S. is providing a credit to existing parents. </p>
<p>It’s less likely that we’ll see single women openly derided as contemporary spinsters for choosing not to have children – although, <a href="https://theconversation.com/spinster-old-maid-or-self-partnered-why-words-for-single-women-have-changed-through-time-126716">as I’ve written</a>, Americans still tend to stigmatize women who choose to stay single and childless.</p>
<p>But if the past is any guide, 21st-century superpowers will continue to engage in pronatalist strategies, because marriage, family and reproduction are still seen as the cornerstones of societal and political power.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164214/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Froide does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Go back to 17th- and 18th-century England and France and you’ll see the same sort of handwringing over birthrates that we’re seeing today.
Amy Froide, Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/163777
2021-07-05T11:06:44Z
2021-07-05T11:06:44Z
What one Georgian family can teach us about writing letters in the age of Zoom
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409473/original/file-20210702-26-b8qc93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C6016%2C4016&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/mother-daughter-sitting-by-window-checking-1093239011">Zivica Kerkez/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The pandemic has led to a huge increase in how often we use video calls (especially Zoom) to contact family, friends and loved ones <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbe2.246">across households</a>. However, separation from loved ones is not new. From at least the 18th century, people have been communicating at a distance to maintain relationships. In an age before video calls, texts and social media, showing someone outside your household that you cared meant writing them a letter. </p>
<p>While many <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/mar/09/nielsen-social-networks">have charted</a> the <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media">rise of</a> new <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/23/ok-zoomer-zoom-worlds-new-favourite-social-network-12443418/">communications technologies</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/11/royal-mail-delivers-record-parcel-numbers-as-covid-cuts-despatch-of-letters**">the decline</a> of letter writing in recent years, my ongoing research examines how people in the 18th and 19th centuries connected. With a focus on one Anglo-Irish family, the Cannings, I’ve considered how people used letters to maintain their emotional relationships at a distance.</p>
<h2>The Canning family letters</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://issuu.com/swwdtpgenderandsexualityresearch/docs/gendered_voicess_issue_four_emotion_and_identity">Canning archives</a> contain over 1,500 letters from 12 family members from 1760-1830. The most famous member of the family was <a href="https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/canning-george-1770-1827">George Canning</a>, prominent politician and UK prime minister in 1827. The letters evidence the relationships between him and his close family. The volume of correspondence between relatives shows how a network of letter writers communicated and maintained family ties despite being apart. </p>
<p>Hitty Canning, George’s aunt, is one of the main letter writers in the family. An Anglo-Irish widow with five children, she wrote to her teenage daughter Bess whenever she was away from home, often every two days. Full of phrases like “a thousand kisses”, regular updates and affectionate monikers like “my little chick”, the pair’s 1789 letters reveal a number of special moments between them. From jokes written in French (to keep the other readers of these letters in the dark) to advice on behaviour, etiquette and social skills, Hitty and Bess’s correspondence shows that they care about maintaining their intimacy through shared memories and secrets.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Antique quill on old written letter" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409475/original/file-20210702-25-1u8s7g5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409475/original/file-20210702-25-1u8s7g5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409475/original/file-20210702-25-1u8s7g5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409475/original/file-20210702-25-1u8s7g5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409475/original/file-20210702-25-1u8s7g5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409475/original/file-20210702-25-1u8s7g5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409475/original/file-20210702-25-1u8s7g5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Taking the time to write a letter was a sign of affection and commitment to a relationship.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/love-letter-antique-quill-on-black-49617142">NotarYES/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, it was less the contents of these letters but the fact that they were sent regularly that truly maintained relationships. On one occasion in 1789, Hitty even wrote a letter to Bess that started with the fact that she had no news or anything to write about, and yet still filled four sides. Taking the time to write a letter was a sign of affection and commitment to a relationship, an association that has endured, especially with love letters. </p>
<p>Today when someone writes a letter, its rarity makes it an exciting, precious object, a sign of someone’s time and care in composing and posting it rather than simply sending a text. It’s also a lasting reminder, as an object imbibed with emotions, of the relationship that created it. This was the same for familial letters in the 18th century, notwithstanding that they were far more common. </p>
<h2>Video calls versus letters</h2>
<p>There are actually many similarities between Zoom and letters. Today we complain of “<a href="https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions/">Zoom fatigue</a>”, but letter fatigue was also a concept in the 18th century. </p>
<p>Anyone who has written a letter will know how taxing it can be. Many 18th-century letter writers complained about how many letters they had to write and also how difficult it was to compose a letter within the accepted form and emotional restraints, to ensure proper communication with their recipient.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Nine people on a zoom call" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409477/original/file-20210702-21-18hkv65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409477/original/file-20210702-21-18hkv65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409477/original/file-20210702-21-18hkv65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409477/original/file-20210702-21-18hkv65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=385&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409477/original/file-20210702-21-18hkv65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409477/original/file-20210702-21-18hkv65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409477/original/file-20210702-21-18hkv65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many have complained that zoom fatigue is getting in the way of maintaining contact with loved ones.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/shot-screen-teammates-doing-virtual-happy-1716591505">Cabeca de Marmore</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Cannings all expressed how tiring letter writing was. Hitty, for example, wrote to her daughter Bess in 1789 saying that she had to “have a holiday” from her pen as she had written so many letters, including one to America. George Canning Sr, George Canning’s father, wrote of his “trial” of writing about his feelings for his paramour Mary Ann Costello <a href="http://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?docId=IAMS037-003366442&vid=IAMS_VU2&indx=1&dym=false&dscnt=1&onCampus=false&group=ALL&institution=BL&ct=search&vl(freeText0)=037-003366442">in 1767</a>, as he had to write without artifice and flattery but still address the usual conventions of declaring the strength of his feelings and persuading Mary Ann that he was the man for her.</p>
<p>But that’s perhaps why the letter became a symbol of affection, commitment and love. Writing about how hard and time consuming it was to write a letter showed that you cared about your loved ones. George Canning Sr wrote about the difficulties he had in communicating his “love” for Mary Ann in a letter saying: “I have taken up the pen, though much at a loss how to employ it”, and future Prime Minister George Canning wrote with “fear and trembling” as he tried to snatch time to reply to his cousin, Bess, before being interrupted by his morning visitors. All emphasised that they wrote letters for the sake of their loved ones.</p>
<p>Like today’s internet connection issues, technological issues also hampered 18th-century letter writers. Many contain frustrations with pens (quills) and the difficulties in sharpening them for writing. There were also issues with sending letters, which could take anywhere from a day across London to several months for those overseas. Thus, patience was an important virtue and made the resultant letter an even more precious commodity.</p>
<p>While letters aren’t as practical for today’s fast-paced society, they remain a wonderful, nostalgic communication method, full of emotional meaning. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that every now and then it’s good to slow down and connect with those closest to us. So, consider sending a loved one a handwritten letter to show them that you care. It may just make their day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163777/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Smith receives funding from South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, who are funded by UK Research and Innovation, for her PhD thesis. </span></em></p>
The written word has guided us through distance from our loved ones for centuries. Here’s how it can bring us closer
Rachel Bynoth, PhD Researcher, Cardiff University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/160599
2021-05-23T20:15:47Z
2021-05-23T20:15:47Z
If I could go anywhere: Marie Antoinette’s private boudoir and mechanical mirror room at Versailles
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402054/original/file-20210521-15-1l4qak4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=92%2C58%2C5389%2C3564&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Le Petit Trianon</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/little-trianon-france-22-august-260nw-478921510.jpg">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/if-i-could-go-anywhere-102157">this series</a> we pay tribute to the art we wish could visit — and hope to see once travel restrictions are lifted.</em></p>
<p>Along a dusty path on the outskirts of the Château de Versailles lies my favourite destination: <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/marie-antoinette-134629573/">Queen Marie-Antoinette</a>’s private bedroom and <em>boudoir</em> in the <a href="https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/estate/estate-trianon">Petit Trianon</a> (small trianon). Built for King Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour in 1768, it was gifted to the new queen of France by Lous XVI and refurbished after 1774. </p>
<p>It was already an extremely beautiful cuboid design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the height of neo-classical French taste. Its reconfiguration and that of the surrounding grounds by the queen saw it embody a raft of new ideas concerning everything from the education of children to what women should wear. </p>
<p>The bedroom and boudoir were rooms in which the queen retreated from the formality and etiquette of the main palace of Versailles to spend time with women friends. She assembled aristocrats such as the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-Therese-Louise-de-Savoie-Carignan-princesse-de-Lamballe">Princesse de Lamballe</a> as well as famed portrait painter <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/vigee-le-brun">Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Painting of French queen" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=772&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402041/original/file-20210521-13-14cjg3l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marie-Antoinette, by Elisabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun, 1783, French painting, oil on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/marieantoinette-by-elisabethlouise-vigee-le-600w-423235789.jpg">Shutterstock/Everett Collection</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here the group wore a wardrobe not possible at formal assemblies: loose, tubular muslin dresses secured with a high sash, similar to juvenile girls’ clothes worn in England and the practical Creole summer dress they knew of from the French colony Louisiana. </p>
<p>The clothes were considered so scandalous that Vigée-Lebrun’s painting of the queen in such attire had to be taken down at the public Salon exhibition. The queen looked like she was in her underwear, the pose was too informal and the superfine muslin was likely imported from India. It was replaced by another portrait by Vigée-Lebrun of the queen in French silk, one of the many luxury trades that bolstered the French economy. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-what-is-it-about-versailles-69559">Friday essay: what is it about Versailles?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Boudoir</em> to <em>jardin</em></h2>
<p>Leaving the formal apartment the ceilings suddenly lower. Framed by two large corner picture windows are views from the boudoir of the garden outside. But this is no ordinary garden. </p>
<p>French formal architecture had been characterised by geometrical designs in which trees and other plantings were clipped into axial vistas, often leading to sculptures or fountains indicating the status of the king, aristocrat or grandee who commissioned the work. The garden at Versailles was an abstraction in which viewing positions and plantings were subject to order, the ultimate act of control. Enormous canals mirrored the sky, unifying heaven and earth under the spell of their creator, Louis XIV.</p>
<p>From Marie-Antoinette’s window we see a simple landscape in which a large tree on the side anchors the “composition”. This was the new <em>jardin anglais</em> (English garden), claimed to embody ideas of liberty and freedom rather than French absolutism. Such gardens were anchored by asymmetrical lakes, elegant, classical pavilions as well as “ruins” (faked old structures, in which hermits sometimes resided) evoking melancholy and Romanticism. </p>
<p>Marie Antoinette’s private view looks rather like the wings of a theatre. Rather than a painting, we look out at nature, reframed by a set designer and man-made for wandering and thoughtful contemplation.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XHcQsfCZ1tA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The 19-year-old queen was given exclusive use of Le Petit Trianon and made it her own.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-movie-scenes-sofia-coppolas-marie-antoinette-101893">The great movie scenes: Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Magic mirrors</h2>
<p>Light pours into the boudoir from several directions. It falls onto delicate wall panelling and a beautiful set of calcified, white gessoed furniture in the most advanced taste by <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/202141">Georges Jacob</a>. The perfectly cubic space is small, accommodating only about four people comfortably, a contrast to court levées or assemblies for hundreds. </p>
<p>As evening comes, a miracle happens. From the basement kitchen-floor below, as directed by the queen, come two large <em>glaces volantes</em> (flying Venetian mirrors) to fill the window panes, raised by a series of weights and pulleys. The engineer Mercklein received 12,500 livres tournois (later francs) for this innovation (overall per capita income was about <a href="https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27692/1/MPRA_paper_27692.pdf">250 per year</a>); his system is now electrified.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="ornate french boudoir" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402043/original/file-20210521-19-1eqtcyo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mechanical mirrors emerge from the basement level to cover the windows.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The room goes from day to night. Views of a garden, perhaps on a gloomy day in autumn, are replaced by the sparkling reflections of mirror. Large expanses of mirror glass could only be made in Venice until industrial espionage brought the technology to France. Mirrors perform important cultural work as they can infer vanity, falsehood or indeed show the truth. Animated guests were doubled and conversed like shadowy ghosts. </p>
<p>The queen and her circle could not be observed. Privacy, a new social conception that comes to govern middle-class life in the 19th century, now reigns. What a contrast to the <a href="https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/estate/palace/hall-mirrors">Hall of Mirrors</a> at the palace, where a sense of infinite repetition was created in a 73-metre-long gallery with 17 enormous windows and where hundreds of people thronged.</p>
<h2>A reputation for scandal</h2>
<p>Marie-Antoinette’s domain at Versailles was dominated by her frustration with a rigid court and her desire to embrace contemporary ideas. In her adjacent <a href="https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/estate/estate-trianon/queen-hamlet#history-of-the-premises">farmlet</a> (the <em>hameau</em>), farm buildings were built to look shabby. Simulated wooden buckets of the finest porcelain by Sèvres lined the farmhouse stairs. </p>
<p>Following the educational ideas of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Jacques-Rousseau">Jean-Jacques Rousseau</a>, Marie-Antoinette encouraged her children to plant seeds and dig the earth. She did not, as many believe, play at being a shepherdess or farmer. The woman who was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/story/did-marie-antoinette-really-say-let-them-eat-cake#:%7E:text=For%20one%20thing%2C%20the%20original,as%20luxurious%20as%20cake%2C%20it">erroneously claimed</a> to have said of the hungry peasantry “let them eat cake” (this translates as brioche or sweet bread and was <a href="https://www.history.com/news/did-marie-antoinette-really-say-let-them-eat-cake">likely uttered by someone else</a>), was simply trying to be a good mother as advocated by contemporary thinkers. </p>
<p>And what of the female friends? The queen was accused of running a tribadic or lesbian household. These scurrilous claims were designed to discredit her circle. Similarly, the bedroom shows no evidence to back the claim in an 18th-century English travel guide that Marie-Antoinette slept in a suspended bed-basket of roses.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="antique bedroom" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402051/original/file-20210521-23-1l55m1g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A bed fit for a queen, but no bed of roses to be seen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/versailles-france-october-14-2018-260nw-1223850688.jpg">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/if-i-could-go-anywhere-boughton-house-the-english-versailles-and-its-shimmering-treasures-157598">If I could go anywhere: Boughton House, ‘the English Versailles’ and its shimmering treasures</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Later generations were not much interested in the queen’s motivations. She became an index of the profligate spending and obscene luxury of the old regime. She and her husband, as well as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se_Louise_of_Savoy,_Princesse_de_Lamballe">Princess de Lamballe</a>, were executed by the guillotine or in massacres between 1792 and 1793.</p>
<p>The mirrors were lowered, the furniture auctioned and the domain went to sleep until <a href="https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/great-characters/eugenie-montijo">Empress Eugénie</a> turned it into a museum honouring the queen. </p>
<p>A Swiss luxury brand has recently restored the rooms. They allow us to imagine a spirited woman married off from Austria aged 14, stripped of her foreign clothes at the French border, who became a lover of the latest French design and manufactures — rather than the debauched queen image we have inherited from the post-revolutionary period. </p>
<p>Wandering through the spaces I didn’t see ghosts. I did see the queen’s modern dress echoed in the brilliant white wall panels. She wandered a little in the distance towards the “temple of love” in her up-to-date garden. Her cracked mirrors are now nicely restored for the tourists. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="gold mirror and candles" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402052/original/file-20210521-19-15sxn6t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Simple, perfect luxury. Inside Marie Antoinette’s rooms at Petit Trianon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/versailles-france-october-14-2018-260nw-1256143720.jpg">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160599/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter McNeil does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A queen with a reputation for scandal, Marie Antoinette enjoyed her private spaces with a small circle of friends. A mirrored room kept the judgments of the outside world at bay.
Peter McNeil, Distinguished Professor of Design History, UTS, University of Technology Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/126533
2019-11-07T12:59:18Z
2019-11-07T12:59:18Z
Meet the raunchy dance teachers who helped shape the modern world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300617/original/file-20191107-10935-aofv3a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lords of the dance. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/join_in/using_digital_images/using_digital_images.aspx?asset_id=174824001&objectId=1647493&partId=1">British Museum</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Get ready for some romance on the dance floor as the second series of Flirty Dancing kicks off. For those that missed the previous outing, it’s the UK dating show where singletons learn one half of a dance for a week and then perform it with a stranger without saying a word. Viewers are <a href="https://www.channel4.com/4viewers/take-part/flirty-dancing">treated to</a> “just a few intense minutes of beautiful choreography” to see if sparks fly. </p>
<p>Reassuming the role of dancing master is Ashley Banjo of Diversity, the dance troupe that won Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. Flirty Dancing is also weeks away from <a href="https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/jenna-dewan-host-flirty-dancing-fox-dating-show-1203364915/">launching</a> a version in the US, so it looks set to become the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/14/entertainment/gallery/biggest-british-television-exports/index.html">latest</a> major British TV export following other successes like <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dA4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=idols+tv+franchise&source=bl&ots=8uz_FxluGy&sig=ACfU3U0gK8ppX54EvZjkZMNQL8KQVaOZyg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-1rSm_tXlAhURi1wKHcqCBg4Q6AEwDnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=idols%20tv%20franchise&f=false">Pop Idol</a> and <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/06/236671/love-island-cast-season-1-us">Love Island</a>. </p>
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<p>Modern viewers might think of Flirty Dancing as little more than a cross between <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m8dq">Strictly Come Dancing</a> and <a href="https://www.channel5.com/show/blind-date/">Blind Date</a>. But as music historians, we know that the idea of dancing masters – instructors who prepared pupils to dance at balls to find the love of their life – dates back hundreds of years. It is rooted in the 17th- and 18th-century fashion for formal dances as a means to court and marry. </p>
<p>There is a fascinating history of colourful dancing masters, most of them working class, who knew a route up the social ladder when it was staring them in the face. These men endured ridicule from some who sought their services, but they would shape the future in a way that is too often forgotten. </p>
<h2>You shall go to the ball</h2>
<p>Think of the 18th century and it likely conjures up images of BBC period dramas, of grand houses and gloved hands, of Mr Darcy and proper behaviour and peacocks on the lawn. At least for those with the means, it was a time when balls and dances became public events. They spawned the purpose-built assembly rooms that are still found in many of the UK’s cities today. These were the most fashionable places to be seen in the era – often built at great expense to welcome local and visiting gentry. </p>
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<span class="caption">Pochette violins.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pochette.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>Dances served as a form of speed dating. Just like in Flirty Dancing, many couples would meet on the dance floor for the first time. As one of few opportunities for the sexes to freely mix, it facilitated courting between unfamiliar families or across the class divide. </p>
<p>Dancing masters became the must-have tutors of the era – not only in Britain but across Europe. Dance lessons were mostly held at pupils’ homes rather than dedicated schools, at least until later in the period. Musical accompanists were usually too costly, so dancing masters would often play simple popular tunes on small violins called <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/505410?&searchField=All&sortBy=Relevance&ft=pochette&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=1">kits or pochettes</a> – so-called because they would stow the instrument in the long pockets of their coats. </p>
<h2>Devil’s grasshoppers</h2>
<p>Yet if dancing masters were essential, they were not always held in high regard. They were disdained by genteel society for trying to emulate upper-class styles and mannerisms. They developed a reputation for seducing pupils, making many parents wary of inviting them into their homes, and there were many bastardy cases citing dancing masters as the presumed father. </p>
<p>The unease around these working-class men in close proximity to society women is famously documented in the diary of Samuel Pepys, where his suspicions of his wife’s tutor creep to the fore. On Friday, May 15, 1663, just four weeks after lessons began, Pepys <a href="https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1663/05/15/">writes of</a> returning home to find his “wife and the dancing master alone above, not dancing but talking”. Pepys was “so deadly full of jealousy” that he checked to see if his wife “did wear drawers … as she used to do” – though found no evidence of foul play. </p>
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<span class="caption">Grown ladies taught to dance, John Collett c.1768.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3083220&partId=1&searchText=grown+ladies+taught+to+dance&page=1">British Museum</a></span>
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<p>In the words of the satirist Thomas Brown, from 1707, the dancing masters of London <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HXRMAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA247&lpg=PA247&dq=%E2%80%98held+in+very+slight+Esteem,+for+the+Gentry+call+them+Leg-Livers,+and+the+Mob+from+their+mighty+Number,+and+their+Nimbleness,+call+them+the+Devil%E2%80%99s+Grass-hoppers%E2%80%99&source=bl&ots=KjMwRW-IGH&sig=ACfU3U11NnyOLZ_5Oaw-jdJ0tai0RqRzXQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjqp_rbjNblAhWxoFwKHYo8DxAQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%98held%20in%20very%20slight%20Esteem%2C%20for%20the%20Gentry%20call%20them%20Leg-Livers%2C%20and%20the%20Mob%20from%20their%20mighty%20Number%2C%20and%20their%20Nimbleness%2C%20call%20them%20the%20Devil%E2%80%99s%20Grass-hoppers%E2%80%99&f=false">were</a> “held in very slight esteem, for the gentry call them leg-livers, and the mob from their mighty number, and their nimbleness, call them the devil’s grasshoppers”. Edward Ward, a close friend of Brown, went one better in 1722 when he <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/dancing-master-a-satyr-canto-i/oclc/752525770">likened</a> them to “monkeys, baboons, and horrid grinning apes”, and “the dregs and scum of all the Earth”. </p>
<p>The engraving above, Grown Ladies Taught to Dance, shows a dancing master of slight build instructing an elderly and much taller woman, watched by two giggling young girls. In the background, on the wall, you can just make out a painting in which a monkey dancing master is tutoring a cat in a dress. </p>
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<span class="caption">The enraged dancing master.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?assetId=620717&objectId=1674414&partId=1">British Museum</a></span>
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<p>Dancing masters were still the butt of cruel jokes by the early 19th century. The 1803 cartoon opposite depicts a lesson being interrupted by the taxman, who was there to “collect duty on hops in which I’m told you deal very extensively”. To send up dancing masters’ fondness for faux-French mannerisms, this tutor is Frenchified with the replacement of “the” with “de”, as he threatens to make the taxman “hop to de Devils”. </p>
<h2>Pride and prejudice</h2>
<p>Despite their reputation, dancing masters were integral in constructing society as we know it today. They were essential employees of a household, and probably responsible for many marriages and business deals – some possibly highly influential. </p>
<p>One notable example was Abraham Mackintosh, born in Edinburgh in 1769, who made his name in Newcastle in the northeast of England. Mackintosh was particularly successful at schmoozing the well-heeled, shrewdly dedicating his compositions to notable members of society. </p>
<p>He specialised in bringing the latest fashionable dances to Newcastle from London, while taking advantage of the fashion for Scottishness at the turn of the 19th century by mainly publishing tunes in the style of strathspeys and reels. His work is the subject of <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dancing-on-the-tyne-registration-67524356167">an exhibition</a> that we are holding as part of the national <a href="https://beinghumanfestival.org/">Being Human festival</a>, which begins on November 14. </p>
<p>So when we watch Ashley Banjo in action on Flirty Dancing – or indeed the professional dancers that work with the celebrities on Strictly Come Dancing – it is fascinating to reflect on their lineage. The dancing masters who prepared the heirs of the Renaissance for the mating rituals of society balls may not always have got the thanks they deserved, but modern Britain might have looked very different without them. </p>
<p><em>Flirty Dancing starts on Channel 4 on Friday, November 8 at 8pm</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126533/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katherine Butler received a small award from the Being Human festival for the exhibition on Abraham Mackintosh.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachael Durkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Channel 4 dating show Flirty Dancing is a reminder of the 18th century men who endured endless abuse to get Britain moving.
Rachael Durkin, Senior Lecturer in Music, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Katherine Butler, Senior Lecturer in Music, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.