History in Conversation

What's in a Name?: The 'Conversation' Piece in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Kate Retford (Birkbeck, University of London)

7 November 2012

Secularisation: Or Otherwise in Eighteenth-Century England?

Penelope J. Corfield (Royal Holloway, University of London)

5 December 2012

The World is not Enough: Global History, Cotton Textiles and the Industrial Revolution.

Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick)

30 January 2013.

'For the benefit of example': hanging felons at the scene of their crime in the long eighteenth century

In this talk Poole begins reconsidering popular assumptions about public executions during the long eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the act of hanging offenders at the scene of their crime. The podcast looks into the tradition of hanging felons at the so-called ‘usual place’ - or at the scene of their crime, in high profile cases - following a public procession, using a ladder or cart and drop. Poole details the flaws with this system, including the opportunity for rescue attempts and the ability for the felon to ‘play to the crowd’ and ‘solicit sympathy’. The seminar next looks at the replacement of this process at Tyburn, in which the hangings and processions are replaced in 1783, with a trap door and drop, which was seen as a signifier of modernity. The lack of a geographical pattern in terms of following suit to this new mechanism is noted, with it being detailed that many places changed the mechanism of the drop, though kept the procession and continued to do so at ‘the usual place’ or scene of the crime. With this in mind, Poole notes the paradox in the continuation of hanging felons at the scene of the crime in an age when the modernising and routinizing of hangings was policy. Highlighted are the reasons for this continuation, such as to make an example of the felon or with an aim to induce confession, in addition to the effects of doing so, including added cost.

Steve Poole (University of the West of England)

Britain's Lost Revolution: Remembering the Gordon Riots on their 230th Anniversary

A symposium with Ian Haywood and John Seed (Roehampton), Tim Hitchcock and Matthew White (Herts)

22 June 2010

Professor Catherine Hall (UCL)

Zachary Macaulay, the father, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the son. One a leading abolitionist, the other a great historian: both men were shaped, albeit differently, by experiences of empire. How did each imagine the nation and its relation to empire? How significant were their visions and what are their legacies?

28 November 2011

Professor Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary, University of London)

Had Keats lived, there would have been a rival. But as it is, there is no one to touch Milton as a master of English poetry and of prose. It was one of the pleasures of Quentin Skinner’s Creighton lecture that he used it, as he himself remarked, as an excuse to quote some of the finest passages of seventeenth century prose. One of Skinner’s main points was that Milton’s conception of liberty was not, as is dominant in modern thought, freedom of action; rather it is freedom from the arbitrary power of another. In Milton’s time this arbitrary power was expressed above all by the royal veto, or “negative voice”, and is one of the principal planks of Milton’s argument against the institution of monarchy.

13 November 2012

Robert John Service

18 November 2009

Kate Chedgzoy focused on the archive and how memory could be drawn out from documents where it is not obviously there. For Chedgzoy’s own studies – women history and the history of children – the archives rarely give the limelight to such evidence. However, if one looks closely and from alternative perspectives evidence can nonetheless be amassed. Children’s history is a case in point and one where Chedgzoy has identified a problem with current studies. Historians tend to look at children as the subject of their study rather than ask the question of what children thought or what they saw as their own memories. Of course, the main reason for this is that the archives do not easily give up such information. However, stray references to what parents of children write can help to give a partial picture as can adults memories of their childhood. One particularly striking example is a 1670s manuscript by Nathanial Friend who wrote a memorial to his boy who had recently died.

Andrew Hiscock uses Shakespeare’s Tempest as his starting point emphasising the symbolic practice of memory that it enacts. The conversation is between Prospero and Miranda and recalls both selective remembrance and the drawing out of alternative scenarios: PROSPERO The hour’s now come; The very minute bids thee ope thine ear; Obey and be attentive. Canst thou remember A time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not Out three years old. MIRANDA Certainly, sir, I can. PROSPERO By what? by any other house or person? Of any thing the image tell me that Hath kept with thy remembrance. MIRANDA ‘Tis far off And rather like a dream than an assurance That my remembrance warrants. Had I not Four or five women once that tended me? PROSPERO Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou remember’st aught ere thou camest here, How thou camest here thou mayst. Hiscock argues that the early modern reader was encouraged to consider the past in terms of memorial and as symbolism for the present. What should be remembered? This is the key question that early modern writers grappled with. John Foxe, for instance, sought out a revised knowledge of the past; one where the Roman Catholic religion was repositioned as a foreign enemy and heretical groups – such as the Lollards – recast as true followers. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene emphasised the training of memory for the pursuit of memorial.