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Political Engines: The Emotional Politics of Bells in Eighteenth-Century England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2020
Abstract
This article asks how and why bells maintained their central place in political culture between 1660 and 1832, a question that can best be approached from the perspective of histories of the emotions and senses. Such a consideration of bells allows us to extend the concept of “emotives” to encompass material culture. Often believed to “speak,” bells were fundamental to a binary emotional regime: the joy and sorrow they expressed and created were essential to perceptions of deference, community, and national feeling. But they could also be inverted and used a form of resistance. For those outside the religious or political status quo, bells could instantiate forms of emotional suffering. Tracing the “listening public” of which bells were part demonstrates the importance of the freedom to hear in the eighteenth-century public sphere. In this context, the ascription of material and emotional agency to bells was a useful rhetorical tool. Its deployment in newspaper reports of ringing, which served to encourage certain ways of listening, points to the importance of both text and sound in creating a “listening public.” But this listening public was also marked by forms of emotional suffering and exclusion that trouble the place of practices of celebration in any nascent “English” or “British” identity.
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References
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44 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (London), 13 August 1720 (emphasis mine).
45 Similar phrases occur in Post Boy (London), 29 May–2 June 1697; Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, Saturday, 5 November 5, 1720; E. Johnson's British Gazette and Sunday Monitor (London), 31 May 1795; Derby Mercury, 27 April 1825.
46 Leeds Mercury, 7 January 1815 (emphasis mine).
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49 A less free-flowing understanding than that offered by other authors, who have failed to think through the metaphor of contagion and its wider place in eighteenth-century culture; for example Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, 1996), 3, 7.
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52 Berrow's Worcester Journal, 1 February 1761; Owen's Weekly Chronicle and Westminster Journal, 23–30 June 1770; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London), 24 May 1780; Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 9 September 1805.
53 C. M., Campanalogia Improved; or, The art of ringing made easy […] (London, 1733), 201–2.
54 Amy B. Oberlin, “‘Share with Me in My Grief and Affliction’: Royal Sorrow and Public Mourning in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Parergon 31, no. 2 (2014): 99–120; Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (London, 1999), 1–17.
55 The Norwich Election Budget (Norwich, 1831), 48.
56 Gatty, The Bell, 87–88.
57 London Chronicle, 4–6 November 1760.
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60 On the mathematics of change ringing, see Katherine Hunt, “The Art of Changes: Bell-Ringing, Anagrams, and the Culture of Combination in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48, no. 2 (2018): 387–412.
61 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), 48, 52, 72.
62 See Cyril A. Wratten and John C. Eisel, eds., Order and Disorder in the Eighteenth Century: Newspaper Extracts about Church Bells and Bellringing (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010).
63 See “Marshfield Company of Bell-Ringers, c.1808–1853,” P213/CW/4/1, Gloucestershire Archives; “Ringing Club General Register, Cirencester Ringing Club, c.1794–1850,” P86/1/SP/1/1, Gloucestershire Archives.
64 “The Merry Bells of England,” London, 1828, John Johnson Collection, Harding B 16 (148b), Bodleian Library, Oxford.
65 William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London, 1830), 201.
66 January 1752, trial of William Williams (t17520116-10), Old Bailey Papers Online; December 1762, trial of Joseph Derbin (t17621208-5), Old Bailey Papers Online; November 1808, trial of John Puplett Robert Brown, alias Briggs, (t18081126-5) Old Bailey Papers Online; May 1822, trial of James Butler (t18220522-79), Old Bailey Papers Online. For a sense of the density of bells in London, see Loftis Lawlar, An Alphabetical List of all the Parochial Churches in London and Westminster […] (London, 1722).
67 St. James's Evening Post, 3 March 1733; London Packet or New Lloyd's Evening Post, 10–12 September 1800; Liverpool Mercury, 1 December 1820.
68 For birthdays, see Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (London), 2 January 1720; Northampton Mercury, 27 December 1756; Morning Chronicle (London), 26 January 1805. For coming-of-age, see Daily Journal (London), 25 June 1725; London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 14 October 1740; York Herald, and General Advertiser, 3 September 1825. For presence in localities, see Post Boy (London), 25 July 1710–27 July 1710; London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 31 December 1760–2 January 1762; Morning Post (London), 5 October 1820.
69 London Gazette, 31 May–4 June 1683; London Evening Post, 12–14 September 14, 1765.
70 Morning Post and Gazetteer (London), 14 January 1800.
71 West Briton (Truro), 25 January 1828.
72 For some rare examples that mention this, see Weekly Journal, or, British Gazette (London), 15 June 1717; Northampton Mercury, 1 June 1741; Norwich Mercury, 20 August 1794; Morning Post (London), 29 August 1801.
73 Jackson's Oxford Journal, 31 December 1825; for further references, see “Disbursements etc. 1663–1689 and purchases,” PO3, fol. 42, Bedfordshire Archives; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), 30 June 1790.
74 Public Advertiser (London), 29 June 1790; St. James's Evening Post, 15 December 1724; T. North, Church Bells of Bedfordshire (1883), 138–39, 166–67.
75 B. D., letter to the editor, World (London), 19 June, 1755.
76 “Rutland's Bounty: or, Baslow Bells,” 1760, Roxburghe, 3.413, C.20.f.9.413, British Library.
77 Respectively represented by Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989); J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985).
78 Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 22–25 February 1755; London Evening Post, 3 June 1755; London Chronicle, 10–12 July 1760.
79 London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 31 December 1760; General Evening Post (London), 5–8 February 1780; London Evening Post, 18–21 August 1750.
80 Maidstone Journal, 2 January 1827.
81 Wakefield and Halifax Journal, 13 December 1816; Bury and Norwich Post, 28 June 1826; Bath Chronicle, 31 December 1795; Kentish Gazette, 29 January 1802.
82 Northampton Mercury, 17 August 1793.
83 Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian, “Emotional Light on Eighteenth-Century Print Culture,” in Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian (Basingstoke, 2016), 3–19, at 12.
84 Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1–6; Steve Poole, “‘Till Our Liberties Be Secure’: Popular Sovereignty and Public Space in Bristol, 1780–1850,” Urban History 26, no. 1 (1999): 40–54; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982).
85 For an earlier rural example of the role of bells in community formation, see Stephen Mileson, “Sound and Landscape,” in The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, ed. Christopher M. Gerrard and Alejandra Gutiérrez (Oxford, 2018), 713–27; Victor Morgan, “A Ceremonious Society: An Aspect of Institutional Power in Early Modern Norwich,” in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society, ed. Anne Goldgar and Robert Frost (Leiden, 2004), 133–63, at 148–51.
86 Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence, 25 February 1681; Morning Chronicle (London), 31 March 1825.
87 J. Noble and J. Clark, A Sketch of the Boston Election (Boston, 1830), ix, xii, xvi, xvii; Frank O'Gorman, “Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meanings of Elections in England, 1780–1860,” Past and Present, no. 135 (1992): 79–115, at 86, 95; London Evening Post, 24–27 May 1735; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 3 April 1780.
88 Post Boy (London), 19–22 August 1710; St. James's Chronicle, 7–9 March 1775; Morning Post (London), 17 March 1820.
89 Post Boy (London), 6–8 February 1701.
90 St. James's Chronicle, 1–3 February 1780; General Evening Post (London), 20–23 September 1735; London Evening Post, 19–22 January 1740; Public Advertiser (London), 10 January 1770.
91 London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 10 May 1740; Morning Post (London), 13 July 1815; Trewman's Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 13 July 1820.
92 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (London), 27 August 1720; Daily Journal (London), 7 October 1730; London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 31 December 1760; London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 27–29 April 1775; Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, 1 June 1805.
93 Daily Journal (London), 3 March 1725; London Evening Post, 22–25 November 1735; General Evening Post (London,) 22–24 November 1750; Public Ledger or The Daily Register of Commerce and Intelligence (London), 31 March 1760; General Evening Post (London), 12–15 February 1785; Examiner (London), 5 August 1810.
94 Owen's Weekly Chronicle and Westminster Journal, 23–30 June 1770; Lincoln, Rutland, and Stamford Mercury, 10 June 1803; Norfolk Chronicle, 21 August 1813.
95 Daily Gazetteer (London), 30 July 1735.
96 Morning Chronicle (London), 13 March 1820.
97 Gloucester Journal, 9 June 1817.
98 Matthew McCormack, “Rethinking ‘Loyalty’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2012): 407–21.
99 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 11–14 June 1715; change ringing failed to take hold in Scotland until later in the eighteenth century, partly due to the dimmer view taken of bells by the kirk. Instead the “musick bells” were chimed; General Evening Post (London), 9–12 November 1745.
100 Inscription, fifth Bell of St. Mary Islington, 1808; see John Nelson, The History, Topography, and Antiquities of the Parish of St Mary Islington (London, 1811), 311.
101 For examples, see William Dodd, An account of the rise, progress, and present state of the Magdalen Charity […] (London, 1763), 99; Benjamin Victor, Original letters, dramatic pieces, and poems, vol. 1 (London, 1776), 53; William Windham, A plan of discipline, composed for the use of the militia of the county of Norfolk (London, 1759), vii; John Wilkes, The life and political writings of John Wilkes (Birmingham, 1769), 339.
102 This builds on Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, 2004), 225.
103 Emotional communities are therefore about more than the agreed ways of feeling suggested by Rosenwein in Emotional Communities, 25.
104 Observator (London), 23–26 May 1705, 6–9 June 1705.
105 London Evening Post, 24–26 April 1770; On the significance of forty-five more generally, see John Brewer, “The Number 45: A Wilkite Political Symbol,” in England's Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763, ed. Stephen B. Baxter (London, 1983), 349–75; for further examples of Wilkesite ringing, see Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty, 5–8 May 1770; Public Advertiser (London), 2 May 1770; London Evening Post, 26–28 April 1770.
106 General Evening Post (London), 10–13 February 1770; for similar, see London Evening Post, 20–22 March 1770.
107 Independent Chronicle (London), 27–30 April 1770; Public Advertiser (London), 2 May 1770; Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty, 21–24 April 1770; London Evening Post, 21–24 April 1770; Jackson's Oxford Journal, 18 March 1769.
108 Bury and Norwich Post, 22 November 1820; Liverpool Mercury, 1 December 1820.
109 York Herald, and General Advertiser, 25 November 1820; Morning Chronicle (London), 11 December 1820.
110 Bristol Mercury, 27 November 1820, 23 December 1820; Examiner (London), 10 December 1820.
111 Pinnock, The Laws and Usages, 500–501.
112 John Ambrose Williams, Trial of John Ambrose Williams, for a Libel on the Clergy […] (Durham, 1823), 33.
113 Williams, Trial of John Ambrose Williams, 40.
114 The notion of popular culture as a resource to be variously appropriated by different groups derives from Roger Chartier, “Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin, 1984), 229–54, at 233.
115 Lacey, Listening, 7.
116 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 28–31 October 1699.
117 Observator (London), 7–10 February 1705.
118 Observator (London), 23 August 1704.
119 T. B. Howell, Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason […], vol. 17, 1726–1743 (London, 1813), 765–66.
120 Thomas Hearne's Diaries, Rawlinson MS 169, 71–77, Bodleian Library; Private Accounts of Thomas Hearne, Rawlinson MS 186a, 10–13, Bodleian Library.
121 Jonathan Oates, “The Rise and Fall of Jacobitism in Oxford,” Oxoniensia no. 68 (2003): 89–111, at 94, 99.
122 Listening was a tactic in the sense described by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (London, 1984), 96; this is contrast to the more Durkheimian dominance described by Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 62, 191n100.
123 Post Master (London), 18–21 June 1715; Norwich Gazette or Loyal Packet, 13 July 1717; John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (London, 2014), 27.
124 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 18–21 June 1715, 28–30 June 1715, 2–5 July 1715, 9–12 July 1715, 12–14 July 1715.
125 E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London, 1975), 165.
126 Daily Advertiser (London), 14 June 1745.
127 “James Collier to John Collier, 18 June 1745,” SAY/2/5/1/1864/1867, East Sussex Record Office.
128 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 29 September –1 October 1715.
129 London Evening Post, 14 August 1755; Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty, 14–17 April 1770; General Evening Post (London), 21–23 August 1770; York Courant, 21 August 1770.
130 “Achievements of Admiral Hawke,” Gentleman's Magazine, no. 30 (1760): 52–53.
131 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), 15 June 1785, 2 August 1785.
132 Whitehall Evening Post, 23–25 June 1785, 5–7 July 17, 9–12 July 1785.
133 General Advertiser (London), 2 July 1785.
134 Scots Magazine, no. 25 (1763): 293.
135 Jeffereyes Hamett O'Neale, “An exact representation of a certain wise body without a head in the East going to pay a visit to a certain great body in the West,” London, 1763, etching on paper, no. 31512i, Wellcome Library.
136 London Chronicle, 12 May 1763.
137 Public Advertiser (London), 14 May 1763.
138 London Chronicle, 14 May 1763.
139 Gazeteer and London Daily Advertiser, 14 May 1763.
140 General Evening Post (London), 3 November 1770.
141 Berrow's Worcester Journal, 12 May 1763.
142 London Evening Post, 11–14 October 1740; St. James's Evening Post, 5 March 1728; Norwich Gazette, 19 November 1743.
143 London Evening Post, 6 June 1767.
144 For another example in Preston, see Lloyd's Evening Post (London), 4 October 1769.
145 Brighton Gazette, 5 May 1831.
146 Leicester and Nottingham Journal, 4 January 1772; The mottos upon the eight bells for St. John's Church, Manchester […] (London, 1768).
147 Engraved on the fifth bell at Rye in 1775. See William Holloway, The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Town and Port of Rye […] (London, 1847), 513.
148 Worcester dumb-bells (London, 1710).
149 Weekly Journal or British Gazeteer (London), 6 June 1719.
150 St. James's Evening Post, 4 March 1732.
151 Gebhard Friedrich August Wendeborn, A View of England towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (London, 1791), 342.
152 Minister of the Church of England, An Endeavour after further union between conforming & nonconforming Protestants in several particulars (London, 1692), 6–7.
153 My thanks to Jonah Miller for this reference. “Consistory Court Depositions Book,” DL/C/0250, fols. 166–77v, London Metropolitan Archives.
154 Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post (London), 11 February 1721.
155 The Dissenters Conciencious Objections Against the Episcopal Church […] (London, 1705), 9.
156 T. Drummond, Letters to a young dissenter on the general principles of nonconformity […] (London, 1812), 27–31, quotation at 30.
157 Potkay, The Story of Joy, 89–91.
158 W. H. Gatty, “A Sketch of the History of the Parish of St. Mary-in-Arden, and the Township of Marker Harborough,” Transactions of the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society, no. 3 (1874):153–71, at 167–68.
159 “Answers to enquiries from Denton concerning nonconformists and church bells, 1706,” DN/MSC 2/19, Norfolk Record Office; “Letter from John Elliott, Minister of Randwick, Gloucestershire, 30 May 1826,” P263/IN/4/2, Gloucestershire Archives.
160 A Lover of Concord, “Legality of Dissenting Bells,” Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, no. 20 (1825): 533.
161 “Religious Intelligence,” Congregational Magazine, no. 1 (1825): 330–31.
162 Colin M. Haydon, “Samuel Peploe and Catholicism in Preston, 1714,” Recusant History 20, no. 1 (May 1990): 76–80, at 78 (emphasis mine).
163 31 Geo. III C.32.6.9.
164 Margaret M. Turnham, Catholic Faith and Practice in England, 1779–1992: The Role of Revivalism and Renewal (Woodbridge, 2015), 26.
165 Quoted in Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, “‘We Live So Far North’: The Church in the North-East of England,” in The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800, ed. Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain (Woodbridge, 2003), 223–242, at 233.
166 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 12–14 July 1715.
167 Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Rev George Whitefield, vol. 2 (London, 1877), 82, 73, 110, 111. For similar, see Joseph Butterworth Bulmer Clark, ed., An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life of Adam Clarke (London, 1833), 222.
168 Phyllis Mack, “The Senses in Religion: Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century,” in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London, 2016), 85–108, at 94–97; David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London, 1984), 93; Joseph Entwistle, Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Entwistle [… ] (Bristol, 1846), 133, 211.
169 Michael Francis Snape, “Anti-Methodism in Eighteenth-Century England: The Pendle Forest Riots of 1748,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49, no. 2 (1998): 257–81, at 264–65.
170 John Wesley, An extract of the Rev. Mr. John Wesley's Journal, vol. 10, From February 15 1755 to June 16 1758 (London, 1788), 122.
171 “Proceedings in Law Relating to Protestant Dissenters,” Methodist Magazine no. 41 (1818): 386–87; W. M. Jacobs, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2002), 71.
172 Flying Post (London), 13–16 August 1715.
173 An Authentic Account of the Riots in Birmingham […] (Birmingham, 1791), 20.
174 Observator (London), 5–8 April 1710; Abel Boyer, Quadriennium annæ postremum […], vol. 1 (London, 1718–19), 505.
175 Observator (London), 18–21 October 1710.
176 Worcester dumb-bells.
177 John Whitehead, The life of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. [… ] (London, 1793), 175.
178 General Evening Post (London), June 8–10 1780; London Chronicle, 4–6 July 1780.
179 London Chronicle, 20–22 June 1780.
180 Derby Mercury, 18 March 1735–36; for similar, see World (London), 10 March 1790.
181 A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Esq., from a Dissenting Country Attorney […] (Birmingham, 1791), 65.
182 “Letter from Mary Burrough, Carleton Hall, Drigg, Cumberland to John Frewen,” 27 June 1807, FRE/1757, East Sussex Record Office.
183 Morning Post (London), 26 May 1825; Trewman's Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 26 May 1825; Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 23 May 1825; Ipswich Journal, 21 May 1825; Coventry Herald, 20 May 1825.
184 Morning Chronicle (London), 26 May 1825.
185 Morning Chronicle (London), 27 May 1825.
186 Liverpool Mercury, 2 December 1825.
187 Leeds Mercury, 15 August 1829.
188 Derby Mercury, 10 November 1830; Standard, 6 November 1833; Berrow's Worcester Journal, 7 November 1833; Liverpool Mercury, 8 November 1833; York Herald and General Advertiser, 12 November 1842; Manchester Times and Gazette, 9 November 1844; Morning Post (London), 7 November 1849; Preston Guardian, 9 November 1850; “Saffron Walden, Bell Ringer's bills, 1821–1848,” D/B 2/PAR13/37, Essex Record Office.
189 Leonard Lovechurch [George Smith], Letter to the inhabitants of Sheffield […] (Sheffield, 1798), 4, 13.
190 See the much-reprinted “The Merry Bells of England,” London, 1828, John Johnson Collection, Harding B16 (148b), Bodleian Library, Oxford; “The Factory Bells of England,” Leeds, 1855, John Johnson Collection, Harding B16 (83b), Bodleian Library, Oxford.
191 A more comprehensive study is one subject of my current research and current book project, “The Untimely Death of an Urban Soundscape.”
192 For good examples, see the essays in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, ed. Stephanie Downs, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (Oxford, 2018).
193 William M. Reddy, “Against Constructivism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (1997): 327–51.
194 Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, 2010), xii; Ileana Baird, “Introduction. Peregrine Things: Rethinking the Global in Eighteenth-Century Studies,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, ed. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu (Farnham, 2013), 1–16, at 11.
195 For the relationship between representatives’ places of residence and parliamentary seats, see Paul Langford, “Property and ‘Virtual Representation’ in Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 31, no. 1 (1988): 83–115.
196 Inscription on the third bell of All Saints, Northampton, 1782; see The History of the Town of Northampton (Northampton, 1847), 101.
197 On independence, see Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender in Georgian England (Manchester, 2005).
198 Bell-ringing might therefore be understood as another of the theatrical modes of authority described in E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 4 (1974): 382–405, at 389; Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, by Douglas Hay et al. (London, 2011), 17–63, at 26–31.
199 England had been described as such since the seventeenth century. For an early instance, see Abraham Markland, Poems on His Majesties birth and restauration […] (London, 1667), 53.
200 For political theory and the passions, see Albert O. Hirshman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 15; Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli, eds., Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850 (Princeton, 2009).
201 For similar observations from the perspective of the courtroom, see Amy Milka and David Lemmings, “Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Court Room,” Journal of Legal History 38, no. 2 (2017): 157–78.
202 Joanne Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2009), 5, 17; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 347; David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2011), 184–85.
203 George Woodward, “‘A thinking club!!,’” 1796, London, hand-colored etching, 1895,0617.449, British Museum; Geoffrey GAG-’EM-ALL, The Free-born Englishman deprived of his seven senses by the operation of the six new Acts of the boroughmongers (London, 1819).
204 The importance of sensory access in understanding the public sphere has been discussed by Ari Adut, “A Theory of the Public Sphere,” Sociological Theory 30, no. 4 (2012): 238–62; Lacey, Listening Publics.
205 G. L. Apperson, Dictionary of Proverbs, rev. Martin H. Manser, and Stephen Curtis (Ware, 2006), 211.
206 Steedman, Carolyn, “Inside, Outside, Other: Accounts of National Identity in the 19th Century,” History of the Human Sciences 8, no. 2 (1995): 59–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 60–61; Kennedy, Catriona, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2013), 2–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
207 For example, see Conway, Stephen, “War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Isles,” English Historical Review 116, no. 468 (2001): 863–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 887.
208 Segal, Lynne, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London, 2018)Google Scholar; for the contemporary politics of schadenfreude, see Smith, Tiffany Watt, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another's Misfortune (London, 2018), 113–27Google Scholar.