Corresponding interests artisans and gentlemen in nineteenth-century natural history

The British Journal for the History of Science

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1994, Pages 383-408

  Secord, Anne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84971790197     PISSN: 00070874     EISSN: 1474001X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087400032416     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. See Anne Secord, ’Science in the pub: artisan botanists in early nineteenth-century Lancashire’, History of Science (1994), 32, 269–315.
2. Eric Hobsbawm, ’The tramping artisan’, in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, London, 1968, 34-63; Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, Pittsburgh, 1971, 49–52.
3. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, 1980, 19, 133, 147, 149, 153, 162–3, 165. Once the authorities perceived the potential political power of this correspondence network, the London Corresponding Society was condemned as seditious.
4. E. P. Thompson, ’The crime of anonymity’ and ’Appendix’ in Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, Cal Winslow, Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, London, 1977, 255–340.
5. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture England 1750–1914, Cambridge, 1989, 137.
6. Vincent, op. cit. (9), 32-52; David F. Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy, Philadephia, 1992, 43-50; F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830-1900 Cambridge, Mass., 1988, 358–359.
7. George Caley to James Dickson, 13 April 1813, Botany Library, Natural History Museum, London, Banksian Collection Manuscript, Robert Brown Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 110.
8. When possible, the upper classes also avoided payment. Before 1840, peers and MPs had the privilege of franking their own letters and would often (illegally) offer this favour of free postage to their friends. See Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History, Princeton, 1948, 113–18, 282–3.
9. Edinburgh Review (1819), 32, 377.
10. Amanda Vickery, ’Women of the Local Elite in Lancashire, 1750—c. 1825’, University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1991, 128, notes that the marked differences in courtship letters of an eighteenth-century couple and those of a couple in the early nineteenth century are certainly not derived from letter-writing manuals, which hardly change between 1740 and 1840.
11. James Jennings, The Family Cyclopaedia; Being A Manual of Useful and Necessary Knowledge, 2 vols., London, 1821, ii, 712–13.
12. W. J. Hooker to Robert Brown, 8 November 1818 and 21 October 1815, British Library, Robert Brown Correspondence, Add. MSS 32440, ff. 203–204, ff. 87–8.