Sources, Empathy and Politics in 'history from below'.

This post was commissioned for inclusion in an online symposium on 'history from below' over at the Many Headed Monster, and is best read in conjunction with the other pieces posted there.  I am reposting it here just by way of keeping track of stuff.  

The purpose and form of history writing has been much debated in recent months; with micro-history, and by extension history from below, being roundly condemned by historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage as the self-serving product of a self-obsessed profession.  For Guldi and Armitage the route to power lies in the writing of grand narrative, designed to inform the debates of modern-day policy makers – big history from above.   Their call to arms – The History Manifesto – has met with a mixed reception.  Their use of evidence has been demonstrated to fall short of the highest academic standards, and their attempts to revise that evidence sotto voce has been castigated for its lack of transparency.  

Regardless of the errors made along the way, of more concern to practitioners of ‘history from below’ is Guldi and Armitage’s assumption that in order to influence contemporary debate and policy formation we should abandon beautifully crafted small stories in favour of large narratives that draw the reader through centuries of clashing forces to some ineluctable conclusion about the present.  I have no real argument with the kind of history they advocate – and the success of recent works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital, suggest that it can both do justice to the evidence, and contribute modern policy debate.  And I am sure with a couple of decades’ hard work (there were 19 years between the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital), Guldi and Armitage will produce a book that lives up to the hype.

But, they fundamentally miss-represent the politics of history writing, and of micro-historical analysis in particular.  And what they seem to miss is a simple appreciation of the shock of the old.  The lessons of history are very seldom about ‘how we got here’ with all its teleological assumptions, but more frequently about how we can think clearly about the present, when we cannot escape from it.  

Understanding classical Greek attitudes to sexuality; Tokugawa Japan’s system of governance, or the use of concentration camps in the Boer War is not about grand narrative, but the interrogation of difference.  What the past has given us is an ‘infinite archive’, reflecting a real – if not fully knowable – world.  By interrogating that archive, we are freed to test our assumptions about the present.  In a scientific mode, we might literally test a theory against the evidence; but just as valid, in a humanist mode we can interrogate a word, a phrase and emotion for its meaning.  In either case, history rapidly becomes a tool to think with – testing and probing the past because it allows us to think about the present more carefully.  

For this purpose, for the purpose of thinking with history, the precise topic of historical analysis is secondary, and ‘grand narrative’ is counterproductive.  In part, grand narrative doesn’t work for this purpose because it is inherently teleological, and brings with it ill-digested assumptions about how human society functions.  One need look no further than the facile accounts of empire found in the work of historians like Niall Fergusson to see the pitfalls; or the risible nationalist diatribes of ‘Historians for Britain’ collective.  If you start with a ‘dog in the fight’ – a defence of American ‘empire’; or an anti-EU agenda - your ability to see clearly is at least compromised.

‘History from below’, by contrast appeals to a very different kind of politics; and it is in essence, a politics of empathy and voice explored through a conversation with the dead.  In the British Marxist tradition, it was founded in the creation of a humanist account of the ‘radical tradition’ that gave to every stockinger and handloom weaver an identity and personality.  The politics of this tradition was found in the demand that the reader empathise with individual men and women caught in a whirl of larger historical changes, and it was, and is, a politics of emotion.  The methodologies of ‘history from below’ use detail and empathy to demand of readers a personal engagement with a specific time and place; just as micro-histories uses the contrast between the everyday and the remarkable, to force the readers’ engagement.

And as a political project, both ‘history from below’ and micro-histories have been remarkably successful.  The public politics of the west in the last fifty years have been dominated by forms of the ‘identity’ politics.   These new politics have helped to push aside the twentieth century’s disastrous obsession with nationalisms (the focus of both older grand narratives, and the crutch leant on by historians such as Fergusson and ‘Historians for Britain’).  

We now have detailed and beautiful histories of the experience of the enslaved, of people excluded by race, gender and sexuality; by dis/ability and poverty.  Each of these ‘histories from below’ have evolved in dialogue with contemporary politics, both feeding the activism of modern campaigns, and perhaps more importantly, ensuring that no-one can be dismissed as less feeling, less human, less important, than anyone else.  By changing the focus of historical writing and research, ‘history from below’ has effectively eroded the inherently racist notion of the ‘volk’ in favour of ‘leuten’; has eroded nationalisms in favour of individual experience.

In other words, history from below has been a remarkably successful form of cultural politics (and Politics), that owes its basic success to the creation of an imaginative and empathetic connection between the individuals, past and present.  But to achieve this end, history from below has made a further contribution to both historical scholarship and methodology that places it at the centre of a wider set of developments.

Despite the (over) reliance of historians such as Edward Thompson on government spy reports, and many social historians’ addiction to parliamentary ‘blue books’; history from below demands that we seek alternative pathways to knowing about individuals – that we seek out readings that work self-consciously against the grain and documents that, however fleetingly, record the experience from below.  And herein lies the problem and the opportunity.  Our sources create a fundamental tension between the bureaucratic character of most inherited documentation reflecting experience from below (endless lists and accounts), and the political work of history from below as a project – to create empathy across time and space.  The conundrum becomes, how do we turn a name, perhaps a number, if you are lucky, a single line – in to a human being.

In part, the answer to this quandary has been found in family and community reconstruction; in the creation of relational databases that pull together fragments of information from as wide a body of sources as can be managed.  When, for instance, small fragments of narrative sieved from pauper letters and examinations, are combined with details of pensions lists and the raw biology available through the International Genealogical Index, we come close to being able to create compelling simulacra of the dead.   A shared experience of childbirth, or hunger; of disability or simple poverty, can be enough to bring to the readers’ minds’ eye a fully formed human being – all the details filled in via the readers’ imagination.   

But even these limited details are unavailable for many.  So we also use strategies of detailed contextualisation.  In part, these strategies mimic the forms of fiction – where small details are used to compress a scene to it tightest compass.  In history from below, we might use location and the built environment as ways of giving authority to an event that would otherwise be dull and off-putting – one of a million settlement examinations; one of five hundred shared beds in a workhouse.  All of which simply gets us to the point where the form and genre of writing history from below comes in to direct conflict with the sources we normally use, creating a tension which in turn explains why ‘history from below’ has been both remarkably productive in the creation of new methodologies; and why, more importantly, it creates a need to rethink and remake the genre of history writing more broadly.

In other words, in the face of challenges from advocates of ‘big history from above’ it seems to me that we are confronted with a series of opportunities, created by the very practise of writing history from below; that in turn provide the basis for a fuller political agenda.  We have an answer to the siren calls of ‘big history’.  And the answer demands just a few things.

First, we need to be much more sophisticated in how we theorise the process of writing and presentation.  There is currently no-one seriously unpacking the literary practise of historical writing from below in a way that would allow us to examine it as an object of study in its own right.  And yet, by being more self-conscious in how we construct emotion and engagement through textual practise, we can raise our game substantially – allowing us to recognise (and teach) the different techniques we use; and to categorise varieties of history writing in new ways.  And while no one would want to see too much self-obsessed naval gazing, there is a real opportunity for substantial criticism that would in turn allow us to present ‘history from below’ as a more fully described set of generic conventions.  Not perhaps a ‘science’, but a clear methodological choice.

Second, we need to embrace innovation more fully, and to identify the digital tools that allow us to construct lives and experience from the distributed leavings of the dead.  The world of early modern and nineteenth century Britain, in particular, are newly available to new forms of connection.  Nominal record linkage, building on a generation of work undertaken by family historians, should allow us to tie up and re-conceptualise the stuff of the dead, as lives available to write about.  Or we can revolutionise close reading of text through a radical contextualisation of words.  By allowing every single word or phrase to be mapped against everything written in the year or decade – we could create a form of close reading that makes for powerful history writing.  Or, we could think about contextualisation more imaginatively, by adding a few more dimensions to the context in which we place our objects of study.  Where is the 3D courtroom and church pulpit; where the soundscape and sound model; where the comprehensive weather data that would allow us to write a life, an event, a moment in new and different detail?

 And finally, my belief is that we need to be more explicit about the political work that we think ‘history from below’ is doing.  If we think the work contributes to a modern political conversation, I think we need to say so – not to simply advocate for our own beliefs, but to use the past to think more carefully about the present.  From my perspective, it does not matter over much if the thinking is about gender, poverty, race or disability; but about ensuring that a conversation with the dead forms a part of our conversation about the present.  

When the likes of Jo Guldi and David Armitage, and the ‘Historians for Britain’ group advocate for big history and the longue durée, they are making specific claims about how they can intervene in a modern politics; and effectively denigrating other people’s politics along the way.  It is only by countering these claims, and replacing them with our own more subtle analysis that we can do full justice to the aspirations and labours of our colleagues.  There is a coherent intellectual project in ‘history from below’, that perhaps needs more critical inspection, that perhaps needs more technical innovation, but which nevertheless provides the best opportunity we have to create an inclusive, progressive, empathetic history – a way of thinking clearly with the past.     

Judging a book by its URLs

It will sound odd, but I have recently had a great time editing URLs.  Robert Shoemaker and I have have just finished a book for CUP, derived from the London Lives project, and called - London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690-1800. It is a long book (170,000 words) and each quote and reference in it is linked via a URL to the original document or article, book or web-resource used as evidence or to contextualize the argument.  It will be published as both an ebook and in hard copy, and the links need to be robust, and secure.  My estimate is that there are in the region of 4,000 URLs included in the manuscript (which was written collaboratively in PMWiki).  In the end, I found that I could identify an appropriate link for 98% of all footnote references, but then had to eliminate around 10% of these, as the relevant URL was just not useable.  The book took some nine years, and I am glad it is finished.

One of my final jobs was editing those 4000 URLs.   It took about three months work, spread over the last year, and I have just finished spending a week or so confirming what I hope will be their final form.  When I have told people about this work many have looked incredulous and suggested that this is the sort of technical implementation process that should be left to others.  A couple of otherwise nice people have suggested I dump this job on the shoulders of the nearest PhD student.  But for myself, it is precisely the kind of thing that an author should do for themselves.  And in doing it, two things kept coming to mind.  First was how the role of the scholar in creating a rigorous academic apparatus is a central part of the intellectual journey that academic writing involves - and that we should see the implementation of the online version of this in the light of the precise writing of footnotes and references that mark out good scholarship.  And second, that URLs encode a system of design and intent, online architecture and system of access, that signal the quality and permanence (the academic credibility and perceived audience) of historical materials online.  And that just as we have always sorted and judged scholarship by its form, we should think a bit harder about how the form of a URL can let us interrogate online materials.

On the first point, I do not know of much discussion of the joys of this kind of academic slog.  There is a lot of good writing on research and archives (by Carolyn Steedman and Arlette Farge among many others), on writing and thinking, but no-one talks much about the painstaking labour that goes in to turning a rough draft in to a final finished piece of scholarship.  And here I am really talking about generating accurate and fully comprehensive footnotes that reflect both the material cited, and the research journey that resulted in the main text.   This has become much easier with online catalogs and citation management packages, but nevertheless remains laborious and a reflection of our collective and individual commitment to a particular kind of evidenced discussion.  But for me it also represents my favourite compromise.  The writing of history is a wonderfully imaginative and creative process.  And in some respects we wish to judge the product of history writing as art.  Is it enjoyable to read? Is it convincing?  Does it do the job of good writing in liberating the readers' imagination?  In making these judgements we tend to appeal to a notion of 'value' that is cultural and that privileges dominant forms of authority.  This aspect of judgement is essentially romantic; with all the implications for western and elite hegemony embedded in that idea.  At the same time history writing is the result of simple hard work of a more technical kind - in the archives, in collating and collecting, re-ordering and interrogating data.  And it is valuable because it encompasses that hard work.  The beauty of the academic apparatus is that it evidences this and in the process generates a different measure of value.  In other words it is where quality is tied to a 'labour theory of value'.  I love the academic slog because it is where un-moored judgement is tied down to hard labour; and where value can be universalized in a common human experience (work).  In other words I really enjoyed editing 4000 URLs precisely because in them and their associated footnotes lies a claim to and evidence of the hard labour that underpins the book itself.

 At the same time, the process also taught me to read URLs differently.  Clearly coders and web designers do this as a matter of course.  But I am a historian and want to read URLs as a scholar, rather than as a programmer or designer.  And for me, the important thing is that URLs embed the structure of a site, making it plain to see for anyone willing to look hard; and that they are made up of both the character of a library reference, and a command directed at the new technology of discovery - the Internet .  There are just lots of different types of URL.

There are 'Search URLs' that include all the elements that  take the user past a collection to a specific object, but don't let you go directly there without the query.  And there are URLs that encode a cataloging hierarchy.  There are URLs that sift data, or work in your browser to change the data delivered, highlighting phrases or sifting material.  And there are URLs that encode licensing, passwords, and access information.  It is easy enough to find that the whole search journey that took you from a library catalog to an individual item is encoded directly in the URL, and even personalized to you, the machine you are using, or the forms of access you can deploy.  It is easy to find URLs that run on for hundreds of characters, each element divided by a '&' or a '%', or such.

But in creating robust reproducible links to credible historical materials most of these URLs are at least problematic if not useless.  If they include details for institutional access, or session information, they cannot be re-used by someone else.  These URLs are friable and fragile things and not fit for scholarly purposes.  And as a result, for the London Lives book we have been forced to eliminate all the links we originally hoped to include to forty or fifty different sites.  To take a single example, most archives structure their online collections with search in mind, making it difficult to link to a single item.  I spent a lot of time finding the catalog entry for every manuscript we cited in the London Metropolitan Archives, and Westminster Archives Centre, only to regretfully strip out the links when confronted by a complex URL that just did not look credible as a long term citation of the item itself.

Even in its simplest, and in the form recommended by the site for sharing a link, a London Metropolitan Archives URL looks like this:

http://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail/REFD+P69~2FBRI~2FB~2F001~2FMS06554~2F004?SESSIONSEARCH


Since we had consulted these items in their physical form in any case, it did not seem too problematic to leave out these links, but a shame nevertheless.  And likewise, with paywall material there seemed little point in dangling real access, and the promise of credible evidence, before the eyes of readers who would not be able to go beyond the login screen.  It seemed better to cite a specific item in combination with a general (unlinked) URL and date of consultation as reflecting our own research journey, rather than to promise access when we could not deliver it.

With few exceptions the URLs that have been retained (and there are still 4000 of them) address specific items with a specific ID, and usually run to 20 to 40 characters.  DOIs are not bad once you figure out their structure and reformulate them as they should be, rather than the way they are normally cited on journal web pages.

dx.doi.org/10.1353/sec.2010.0268

And Google Books creates a very nice URL once you strip out all the complex formatting instructions that are normally generated as part of a search and inserted after the main ID.  This is what a Google Books' URL looks like if you were to use the 'search' version:

 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1sMJGt7_rTAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Prosecution+and+Punishment:+Petty+Crime+and+the+Law%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rrzGUq_aDsSy7Aa_9YGQCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Prosecution%20and%20Punishment%3A%20Petty%20Crime%20and%20the%20Law%22&f=false

And this URL will take to the same book:

 books.google.co.uk/books?id=1sMJGt7_rTAC

 And the Eighteenth-century Short Title Catalog generates some of the most elegant URLs I have found:

estc.bl.uk/T174945

And to a lesser extent, so does the Ethos collection of doctoral theses at the British Library.

ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.354762

And London Lives and the Old Bailey Online do pretty well on this score:

www.londonlives.org/browse.jsp?div=LMSMPS501980014
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?ref=t17910413-19


In part, I suspect that these issues would all disappear if I had a better sense of the layer of structure that lies beneath the WWW.  But for the moment I am keen to have a short, human-readable URL that looks like it will last longer than the session I am currently logged on for.   All of which simply takes me back to the joy of academic slogging and the importance of the academic apparatus as something that evidences hard work and opens up scholarship to credible criticism that goes beyond simple romantic appreciation and prejudice.

I know all too well that one of the skills of an academic is the ability to judge a book by its cover and the form of the text it contains.   For the online we need to embed URLs into precisely this process - and the joy of all that editing was that at the end of it, I feel I have learned to do just that.

A Couple of Eighteenth-Century Ballads

I have recently been involved in a couple of projects that allowed me to engage with the eighteenth century in a very different way than I am used to. I was involved - in a non-musical capacity! - in helping to create recordings of a couple of eighteenth-century ballads.

The first is a ballad the only copy of which (at least as for as I know) is in the British Library, and is titled The Workhouse Cruelty. I first came across this piece in the early 1980s, and haven't really done anything with it since. But, when I was asked to provide a ballad that would help illustrate a case about a murder in a workhouse for Voices from the Old Bailey on Radio 4, it immediately sprang to mind. The nice thing is that the producer, Elizabeth Burke, then went out and had a recording of it made. The result is here:




This particular recording seems a little sweet to me, and lacking in the political grit of the original rough printed version. And I suspect that it was originally sung by a man - of the sort known as a 'chanting' ballad singer (they normally specialised in durge-like religious songs). But it nevertheless made me want to think harder about how one interprets the words, and how one re-constructs the soundscape in which it was performed.

This then encouraged me to have a go at commissioning a recording myself. Francis Place's papers contain the words of a dozen or so, primarily bawdy, ballads he recalled from his youth in the 1780s. The really nice thing about Place's notes, is that he described where he heard them sung - behind St Clements church, etc - and by whom - two young women - and when - in the evening. The ballad I was particularly interested in was Jack Chance, which Place describes as being sung just after the Gordon Riots. As I was giving a lecture on the Riots, it seemed a natural thing to accompany it. I was also familiar with a printed version of this particular song, mis-dated at 1795, and retitled as Just the thing, among the digital collection at ECCO. I integrated the two versions to eliminate some of the blanks in Place's version and asked a friend of my son's, Henry Skewes, to write the music. Unlike most 18th century ballads, no tune was mentioned as being used with this one. Henry wrote the music, and asked another friend Stephanie Waldheim to sing it. The upshot is:

Jack Chance: Or Just the Thing

Music and arrangement by Henry Skewes;
performed by Stephanie Waldheim and Henry Skewes
copyright: 2010, Henry Skewes, Stephanie Waldheim and Tim Hitchcock.

This version has been translated from its original AAC Audio format to a mp3 format, and has developed a few oddities, but you get the point.

One way or another, this experience has taken me back to Bruce Smith's wonderful, but seldom cited, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. It has also reminded me that there is a lot to do to recreate a neighbourhood soundscape, but that if one could, it would help; and that perhaps it is time to have a go.

A Review: The Diary of Edmund Harrold

This is a pre-print of a review commissioned for publication in the Economic History Review ©2009, Economic History Society.

Craig Horner, ed, The diary of Edmund Harrold, wigmaker of Manchester 1712-15 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xxxvii + 178. 3 figs. 1 map. ISBN 9780754661726. Hbk. £55)

Reading a diary always feels slightly transgressive; as if you are looking through the front window of a private home on to a domestic scene beyond. Historians have used the intimate nature of these sources to construct a broad narrative of a changing interiority, of the evolution of a modern ‘self’; and to chart the texture and quality of interpersonal relations. And yet, as any dedicated voyeur knows, most domestic scenes observed through a distant window make for very dull viewing. In a similar way diaries are frequently repetitious and frustrating. The events of most lives are made up of petty conflicts, self-serving worries, and banal jealousies. The diary of Edmund Harrold is no exception. A somewhat maudlin and self-pitying drunk, Edmund Harrold made a poor living as a wig maker in early eighteenth-century Manchester – a manufacturer of perhaps the most useless item imaginable, in a world newly committed to making useful things. This particular diary is not very illuminating about the nature of early industrialization, or the economics of innovation. It tells us remarkably little about the social life of Harrold’s all important contemporary generation of Mancunians, and while it does provide a comprehensive account of pretty much everything Harrold read, even this seems to consist almost entirely of the most conventional of religious writings. Nevertheless, this is an important diary, and this edition, scrupulously transcribed, footnoted, and introduced, is a welcome addition to our modern public understanding of the long dead and very private interior world of one early eighteenth-century Mancunian.

The detail many readers will assume sets this diary apart and gives it heightened scholarly interest is Harrold’s record of his sexual relations with both his second and third wives. And it is true that sexual activity is rarely recorded in even the most revealing of diaries, but it is also remarkably unhelpful. Harrold regularly records that he ‘did wife’ or ‘did wife new fashion’. Since he was also father to nine children, however, these bald statements simply repeat the obvious. Of much greater historical significance is Harrold’s record of his courtship of his third wife Ann Horrocks. The inclusion of a record of night visiting, when combined with the birth of his eighth child, John, six months after the wedding, provides new and individualized evidence that this particular style of courtship was accompanied by penetrative sexual activity. But, even more important are the small details of Edmund Harrold’s emotional engagement with his second wife, Sarah. His account of her decline over a period of some three weeks following the birth of their daughter, and her eventual death in Edmund’s arms is both evocative and moving. In combination with the details he gives of his arrangements for his newly orphaned infant child, also named Sarah, and his active and to modern sensibilities, hasty, search for a new wife, the diary makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the pressures felt by a middle aged, down-at-heel member of the middling sort. These separate elements of the diary help to reveal how emotional engagement, affect and hard calculation might co-exist in a single early modern breast.

The diary also helps to give texture to our story of the evolution of ‘self writing’. It seems to partake equally of the seventeenth century tradition of religious self-examination, and a more ‘modern’ secular concern with personal emotional response. Admixt between these covers are endless self-flagellating explorations of Harrold’s religious laxity; a compelling, unself-conscious story of his relations with two wives; and a detailed and essentially secular narrative of the crash and dodgems journey of a chronic alcoholic.

As an edited edition of an eighteenth-century manuscript, this volume is also exemplary. The introduction is clear and informative, and the academic apparatus is extensive (if occasionally slightly too extensive). Four appendixes are also included. The first reproduces a lecture based on the diary given by J.E. Bailey in 1884; the second, a series of copied abstracts from Charles Povey’s Meditation of a divine soul (1703); the third, a comprehensive and very useful list of all works mentioned by Harrold; and the fourth, a hand list of comparable published diaries. The volume concludes with a good, but not exhaustive index. It is perhaps unfortunate that this work has been published as a hard copy edition, rather than online, and in a form where the occasional glancing reference could be more easily located, but Craig Horner should nevertheless be congratulated for an excellent piece of scholarship.

For the inveterate voyeur, dedicated to wandering the shelves in search of an uncurtained window revealing a meaningful scene beyond, this volume provides a few excellent vantage points. It is perhaps not particularly revealing about the changing nature of economic behavior in the early industrial revolution, but it does reveal a single man, caught in a web of culture, of friends and wives, and alcohol.

TIM HITCHCOCK

Towards a popular conception of the world in 1780.

The text of a contribution to a panel on popular conceptions of the world, for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Oxford, January 2009.

Imagine for a moment living on Long Lane in London, just north of Smithfields Market, in the Spring of 1780, in a furnished, rented room. This is the kind of accommodation shared by the vast majority of working Londoners and recently described by Peter Guillery. [The Small House in Eighteenth-century London (Yale University Press, 2004).] The house you live in is a hundred years old, and made of oak and brick. The windows are small casements and the fire place is rudimentary, creating a barrier to more complex forms of domestic cooking, and forcing you to participate in a local round of public eating. Your room is in a vernacular building, and the dominant colours are the browns of distemper, the off-whites of lime wash, and the darkening hews of unpainted wood. There is the occasional flash of brass, but most of your everyday objects are dull pewter and tin, wood and earthenware. The only strong colours you are likely to live with are found in your clothes – in the flash of a printed bit of cotton, in the red of a neckerchief, in the grey-white of your worn linen. The house you live in is probably like that rented by Francis Place ten years later:

...very dark and dirty... built with timber, lath and plaster; ... filled with rats, mice and bugs.[Mary Thale, ed., The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854), (CUP, 1972), p.107.]

Your working life is similarly old fashioned, built around a small scale process of production and exchange; probably tied to a local hinterland of supply. In other words, for the vast majority of Londoners in 1780 life was embedded within a familiar frame, within a cultural and material economics that must have seemed simply ‘natural’.

But, if in that Spring of 1780 you walked just a few yards from that room, out the door and past the lowing pens of Smithfield, towards Newgate Street, where the new prison was just finishing, you would have been confronted by something else. And the point is simply that while most eighteenth-century Londoners lived in a vernacular city of dull browns and natural hues, and worked in a hand-made world of complex, but decentralised craft, authority was being new built around them in forms of white neo-classicism. What had been a medieval gate – Newgate – of warn shapes and familiar statues, a symbol of community, that marked the boundary between a safe city collective, and a more frightening external world, had been rebuilt over the preceding decade into a massive, white stone edifice, its portals and doors picked out with a ubiquitous black cast iron. The building was three hundred yards long, and walking past this, the longest single street-frontage in London, a newly distant and powerful state authority must have welled up in your heart. In buildings like this – but most especially in Newgate Prison itself – was created a new urban landscape of authority that every pedestrian Londoner needed to interpret and navigate in a new way.

But if authority and power were demonstrated through the use of a neo-classical architectural palate, and an ever growing weight of cast iron, its meanings must have seemed to stretch in every direction.

In the cold baroque of Wren and Hawksmoor’s churches, once again, authority was built in a different colour – in Portland stone and cast iron. The decision in 1714 to spend £11,600 to encircle St Paul’s within a black cast iron paling, topped with spear heads – privatising and monopolising the traditional medieval church yard, the civic centre of London - was simply the first brutal act in the process of creating a new landscape of power. [E. Graeme Robertson and Joan Robertson, Cast Iron Decoration: A World Survey, (Thames and Hudson, 1977; 1994 edn), p.16.]

And what is most significant about this rebuilding of authority is that it seamlessly spread from actual government and religious buildings, to the houses of the simply rich. To walk through a stuccoed London square, with its bright white, mock stone exteriors, its sunken areas encased, not just in cast iron, but by mid-century onwards, by cast iron in the form of spears and daggers; was to be confronted by a ruling class newly comfortable with its own authority, willing to use the signs of state power, to claim a more personal variety.

In other words, a changing world view that necessarily accommodated to new forms of authority was created as late eighteenth Londoners wandered through their city. Class and state authority were re-made of bricks and stone and iron. So when we think of that subtle process of class formation, and its changing conceptions of the world, we need to think about it not just as an intellectual process, but as a physical one as well.

And of course, this new-built environment of class division extended to the smallest of items. In the late 1770s, as black refugees from American slavery flooded into London, with the scars of a brutal system cut in to their very flesh; each product of slavery, each mahogany chest and the contents of each inlaid snuff-box, must have gradually taken on an ever more powerful meaning that claimed for its owners authority over an Atlantic-wide empire.

Peter Linebaugh has written about the symbolism of keys and locks for working Londoners, but it seems to me that the world of meaning and symbol extends to almost every object.[The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, (2nd edn, Verso, 2006), pp.366-8.] A mahogany picture frame was redolent of a system of colonialism that extended across four continents – and was just then, in 1780, in wild and military dispute on all of them. Cotton spoke of an exotic empire and brutal heathens; tobacco and coffee, of the brutalities of slavery, and cast iron and stone, of a new found system of industrial production.

All I am really trying to suggest is that the evolution of a popular conception of the world was, particularly in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, embedded within a physical framing whose signs could be held in your hand, and whose visage fronted every street.

And that therefore, when we try to understand the contents of popular politics, of events such as the Gordon Riots in June 1780, we need to see them not simply as expressions of a stated ideology but as physical engagements with a world full of meaning.

That Newgate Prison formed an early object of assault and destruction is just the most obvious fragment of a process that spread to every level of activity. To ‘pull down’ a house – as the Gordon Rioters did with Lord Manfield’s – was to tear out its sash windows (a symbol of modernity and power that even Jane Austen recognised a few years later in Northanger Abbey); was to burn the mahogany furniture (and smell its distinctive smoke – so different from that of oak and ash and elm); was to make a bonfire of identifiable symbols of authority. To pull down Lord Mansfield's house, was not just to comment upon his role Chief Justice, but to manipulate a coherent series of symbols of state and Imperial authority, made flesh in the objects themselves. A political bonfire of the sort lit by the Gordon Rioters, smelt and sounded, not like a bonfire of celebration (made of oak and broad leafed woods), but instead crackled with the sick sound of burning lacquer, and smelt of mahogany built authority.

In other words conceptions of the world are found as much in the palm of your hand and the memory of smoke in your nostrils, as in the expressed content of your library.