An Interview with Jacqueline Riding on Mid-Georgian Britain

Randall Stephens

Jacqueline Riding is a historian and consultant who is completing her PhD in 18th-century British art and culture. She served as the curator at the Theatre Museum, the Guards Museum, the Tate, the Palace of Westminster, and was founding Director of the Handel House Museum in London. Her Mid-Georgian Britain, “the latest addition to the growing Living Histories series, charts the growth of the empire and looks at the growing importance of London as a capital city where the rich and poor rubbed shoulders. Jacqueline Riding creates a vivid portrait of the daily reality of life for a middle-class family in this age of growing affluence.”* Ever wonder what life was like in an 18th-century city? How did people eat, work, and play? What did they think about the world around them? Riding's concise, immensely entertaining book gives a snapshot of an amazing, vanished world.

Randall Stephens: Your book, Mid-Georgian Britain is a readable, fascinating account of life in the 18th century. Did your own work as a curator and scholar of art and culture influence how you composed the book?

Jacqueline Riding: Thank you very much. The basic chapter structure and length were set out by the publishers, although I did change a few of the headings. For example I think “Charity and Citizenship” is a key theme of the period and I have done a lot of work on the Foundling Hospital (my PhD is on an artist, Joseph Highmore, who donated a history painting to the charity). So I changed the chapter heading accordingly. The tight word length meant I had to be disciplined and the text feels pithy and quite fast-paced, which I like. It was important to stop worrying that so much inevitably gets left out. Even so, some of the themes were out of my comfort zone (dental pelicans anyone?!). So I learned something new too. Word length permitting, I was keen to show contrasts and find unusual facts or opinions rather than trot out the usual Georgian suspects. Having said that I could not resist Dr. Johnson. I think my background in curatorship means I think of an historical period in 3D—a case in point was recreating Handel’s house in Mayfair. I believe it is important not to be confined by a particular academic discipline, to study an historical period in the round. One of the benefits of being an art historian is that you know your way around a picture library, so I was very eager to get really good quality images. Ultimately, if I gave an interesting snap shot of the period, which encourages people to look further and even visit some of the locations mentioned, then I've done my job.

Stephens: Could you say something about how the London of the early 21st century differs from the London of, say, the 1750s?

Riding: Well, if they thought it was big in the mid-eighteenth century, they should see it now . . .

Stephens: Throughout Mid-Georgian Britain you quote a host of contemporary authors. Do you have a favorite character/author from that period?

Riding: It would have to be William Hogarth. He’s quite simply a hero, a real London bruiser with a heart made of putty.

Stephens: You include sections in the book on “Love and Sex, Marriage and Family,” “Home and Neighbourhood,” “Work,” “Food and Drink,” and more. What did you find most interesting to research and write about?

Riding: As I say, most of the headings were provided by the publisher although “Love and Sex . . .” was one of my modifications—partly so I had the excuse to illustrate the syphilitic skull and condom. When you are asked to rattle through a thirty-year period covering as many bases as possible you start to realize how little you know or at least how relatively limited your expertise is. No one is an expert on “the eighteenth century”—it’s just not possible. Humbling but true.

Stephens: Are you working on any projects now that you can tell us about?

Riding: I am indeed. For anyone interested in mid-Georgian art and charity I have an article in Art History Journal titled “The mere relation of the suffering of others’: Joseph Highmore, History Painting and Charity.” I have an article coming out in April’s History Today on Charles Edward Stuart and I am also writing a narrative history on the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 for Bloomsbury Publishing (eta 2013).

Religious History and Prints/Cartoons from the Library of Congress

Randall Stephens

I regularly browse the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division for pictures to illustrate essays, forums, and interviews that appear in Historically Speaking. I also use that extensive, priceless catalog quite a bit to gather material for courses I teach. (A note to authors: the images at the LOC are almost all copyright free!) The LOC includes thousands of hi-res maps, photographs, prints, cartoons, paintings, and more, ready to download.

In the spring I'll be offering an upper level undergraduate class on Religion and American Culture. I love to teach it. No decadal history is this. It runs from the precolumbian period to the present. (Religious history is a hot topic. Not that my course's enrollment reflects that fact. The 2011 AHA has as its theme "History, Society, and the Sacred.")

Below are some amazing LOC images from the 18th and 19th centuries, well-suited for the classroom. ( I include the brief LOC description above each image.) While we go over these in class, I like to ask students general questions like: What is the cartoonist or print maker trying to convey? Who would find the image humorous or illuminating, and who would find it offensive or disturbing? Why? What can we learn about the issues of the day by analyzing the picture? In what sense does the picture reveal the contested nature of religion in public life?

"Enthusiasm display'd: or, the Moor Fields congregation," 1739. The print shows evangelical minister Geroge Whitefield preaching at Moorsfield, London. He is supported by two females, one holding a mask and labeled "Hypocrisy", the other a Janus-faced "Deceit".


"Dr. Squintum's exaltation or the reformation," 1763. Cartoon showing Rev. George Whitefield standing on a three-legged stool, and preaching in the open air; an imp pouring inspiration through a clyster-pipe into his ear; a grotesque Fame, being a female evil-spirit, listens to his discourse with an ear-trumpet, and repeats it in an ordinary trumpet; the Devil clutches gold from under his stool; etc.


"Slavery. Freedom," 1832. Two contrasted scenes divided by a huge cask in which stands, full-face, an obese and repulsive preacher with a heavy jowl, pig's eyes, and a thatch of hair over a low forehead.


Detail from a Puck magazine cartoon, "Superstition Has Always Ruled the World," April 19, 1901. Satirizes the Millerites, followers of William Miller, who predicted the return of Jesus in the 1840s.


"The salamander safe." A millerite preparing for the 23rd of April." A playful caricature of a Millerite, an adherent of the Adventist preacher William Miller who predicted that the world would end on April 23, 1844.


"Our common schools as they are and as they may be [Anti-catholic, anti-Tammany cartoon showing] (1) 'Sectarian Bitterness' of private schools; (2) 'Distribution of the Sectarian Fund' - all to Catholic and none to public schools; (3) 'Union is Strength' - children of all races and religions playing together," 1870.


"Church and state - No Union upon any terms," 1871. A Thomas Nast cartoon showing a woman symbolizing Justice(?) standing at door of building "State", as soldiers block steps to members of different religions.


"The Mormon Problem Solved," 1871. Cartoon of Brigham Young telling Pres. Grant "I must submit to your laws - but what shall I do with these" (hundreds of wives and children); Grant replies: "Do as I do - give them offices."


"Temperance, a centennial allegory." Circa. late-19th century.

Representing Empires (to Students)

Heather Cox Richardson

This simple graphic depiction of France, England, Portugal, and Spain from 1800 to the present strikes

me as a useful way to start a class on modern world history. It could also work in a class on colonial or modern American history—less so for a nineteenth-century course on the U.S.

The growth and conflicts and jockeying of the dots are interesting enough, but when the video gets to the 1960s, the explosion is so dramatic any student can see just what a world watershed the mid-twentieth century was.

For a single country, see also this animated history of Poland. HT to Ralph Luker at HNN

The Western Image, Continued

Heather Cox Richardson

The classic version of the American Western hero is Louis L’Amour’s Flint. Flint is a westerner, adopted by a gunslinger, then educated at fancy eastern schools. He plays the eastern game, becoming a rich businessman in the cutthroat world of industry. But his life has a twist. The secret to his eastern success is that he listens to the little guy, the cabbie who hears a stock tip, the waitress who learns about a business takeover. He values them and their hard work; he treats them as equals.

When an eastern doctor incorrectly diagnoses Flint with cancer, he chucks over his fame as a robber baron to go back to his roots. There, he sticks up for the small ranchers against the big guys, backed by the eastern system. He wins, of course. He’s better with cards, guns, and women than any easterner ever born. And he’s a lot smarter.

Does this image still appeal to Americans?

This TV show (below), appropriately named Outlaw, starts this week.

Cincinnati Daguerreotype Time Machine, 1848

Randall Stephens

What if we could see, in vivid detail, the world of a mid-19th century American city? We can. Sort of.

On a sunny Sunday in September 1848, two clever daguerreotypists, Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter,

placed their camera on a rooftop next to the Ohio River. From Newport, Kentucky, they captured a sweeping panoramic view of Cincinnati. The massive, detailed image that resulted reveals a bustling western city. The original ranks as one of the Cincinnati Public Library's greatest treasures.

The huge picture contains amazing detail. (See the zoom-in from the YouTube clip embedded here.) Visible in the picture are open windows, a distant clock tower, merchants, free blacks, a railroad station, steamboats, factories, shops, and more. Combine all that visual evidence with the 1850-51 Cincinnati Directory, detail from local papers, booster works of the day, statistical reports, and a full picture emerges.

Wired magazine features the 1848 waterfront daguerreotype in its August 2010 issue. "The panorama could be blown up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity," writes Julie Rehmeyer. To reach that level of precision a digital camera version would have to record a staggering 140,000 megapixels per shot. The total stitched-together panorama contains nearly 9-billion pixels. Rehmeyer describes the restoration and stabilization of the plates through the latest technology. Her explanation of the daguerreotype (the latest technology of that day) gives a good sense of how this all worked.

The Cincinnati Library intends to make a zoomable version available on-line next year. Until then, see The University of Rochester and George Eastman House, which has a 180mb version of one part of the Cincinnati Waterfront image on-line. (Warning: That's a massive file.)

I wonder if the zoomable version will be available by the next time I teach my course on American history from 1783-1865. I can see pairing this image up with primary and secondary source materials. Students might answer questions about how the panorama confirms or challenges the reading. What can we learn from the visual record that we can't learn from print? What does the look, design, layout of an America city tell us about this age?

As far as a selection from a primary source . . . any of these would work: James Handasyd Perkins, Annals of the West: Embracing a Concise Account of Principal Events . . . (1852), Charles Cist, The Cincinnati Miscellany (1846), or Eliza R. Steele, A Summer Journey in the West (1841). On the secondary source side: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford, 2007), Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), or David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (Harper Perennial, 2009).