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The nineteenth century witnessed the creation of a 'paper Panopticon' designed to capture information about offenders in England, especially those who were transported to Australia. This article considers the effectiveness of this new record-keeping system and asks whether convicts had some agency within it. These questions are explored through a macroscopic analysis of the recording of convict ages in nineteenth-century England and Australia, made possible by the Digital Panopticon project. By using the methodological opportunities opened up by digital technologies, we can test the accuracy of historical records in new ways, and in the process develop a better understanding of the encounter between state authority and convict agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the English novel "Bleak House," by Charles Dickens. Particular focus is given to the characters of the book's scavenging through rubbish, including in search for waste paper. An overview of the book's representation of the England's economic and social conditions in the 19th century, including of the slums of London, England, is provided.

Drawing on data from mid-19th century Britain, this paper studies strategic interaction among local governments in the choice of welfare benefits under the Poor Law, the local welfare system of the time. The paper exploits a national reform that reduced the length of residency required for welfare eligibility, which should have increased the incentive for welfare migration and thus led to both stronger strategic interaction and lower levels of equilibrium spending. The results show evidence of a positive but small degree of baseline interaction, suggesting that modern models of welfare competition may apply even in settings with relatively high migration costs. While the change in post-reform equilibrium spending is negative as predicted, the results show no evidence of stronger interaction after the reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a clear distinction was drawn between "classical learning" and "modern science" at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the early nineteenth century, we see no such contrast being made in other spaces of knowledge making, such as the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Drawing on Bacon's insistence that his inductive method should apply across all fields of knowledge, early members of the Society interpreted "science" as referring to any systematic inquiry utilising an empirical approach. An investigation of the ways in which classical authors were used within the researches of early members of the Society raises important questions about how we should think about empirical method and scientific research in early nineteenth–century England. Frequently understood as primarily engaged in researching natural knowledge, the members of the Manchester Society concerned themselves with a wide range of subjects across all branches of knowledge. Crucially, classical authors were drawn upon as sources of empirical evidence across all types of inquiry, from investigations into the colours of opaque bodies to the origins of party feeling. It is possible to identify a common approach – "history as empirical method", which, this article suggests, was developed from Bacon's call for a "just story of learning". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with the short history of the English jury in the modern age. The main goal of the author is completing a historical research and finding the most important features concerning legal institutions of the Anglo-Saxon type of lay jurisdiction in England and Ireland. The historical perspective gives a chance to examine the institutions of the jury as a court of citizens integrated into the jurisdiction of the state for a brief period of time. The author takes the view in several periods from the early 19th century up to the end of the 20th century. It is not the procedure but the organisational rules which are under discussion here with special attention to the conditions which determined the role of the jury as a part of county courts and sessions as well as the central tribunals in London. The literature was collected in the British Library during research intervals to have the opportunity to work from special sources not cited by Central-European scholars yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was inspired by the author's fortunate acquisition of a copy of an original copy of "Muspratt's Chemistry" that was published in 1860. This raised, for the author, interesting and significant issues regarding the chemistry content and its presentation in the context of chemistry and education today. The paper is presented in two parts: Part 1 explores the content, structure and gives reactions to and insights into the original publication, whereas Part 2 provides a focus on the developments in chemistry education as experienced by the author during almost 70 years of learning and teaching chemistry in schools and in teacher education in England. James Sheridan Muspratt (1821–1871) is best remembered for this publication which is fully entitled "Chemistry, theoretical, practical and analytical as applied and relating to Arts and Manufactures". This was developed during the period 1852–1860 and ran into several editions as well as being translated into German and Russian. Earlier he had done chemistry research with Liebig and Hofmann, and in 1848 he founded the Liverpool College of Chemistry. It is clear that he corresponded extensively with many of the leading nineteenth century chemists in the UK and Europe, many of whose names are still familiar with us today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is offered as a contribution to understanding historical trade. The method of input-output modelling is utilised to evaluate the evolution of cities (and their associated regions) in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The construction of input-output accounts for each city region is based on "heroic" data assumptions, which enable the construction of a demonstration model illustrating a new iterative approach to historical analysis. In its current application, the model enables estimates to be made of mesolevel trade between cities, which enhances our analysis of urban evolution in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to examine cultural encounters between India and England in an 1885 Bengali travelogue Englandey Bangamahila [A Bengali Lady in England] by Krishnabhabini Das, who travelled to England with her husband at a time when the idea and practice of travelling women was either inconceivable or deemed a taboo in India. The travelogue under study deals with Das's several journeys in England and provides an intriguing account of her understanding of colonial English culture. My prime objective is to underline how Das presents England from the perspective of a female, marginal subject. To this end, I elaborate on foregrounded tensions between London and Calcutta, and Englishwomen and Hindu women as they are represented through the reversed gaze. By highlighting the cross-border connections in the travelogue as a transnational narrative, I aim to shed light on the connective histories of India and England in the long nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of the half-holiday in North Staffordshire during the mid-1870s facilitated a dramatic increase in association football activity throughout the region. However, the game was undoubtedly still in its formative stages, with various sets of contrasting rules being applied simultaneously by clubs and players, which created a significant amount of confusion and, at times, conflict. In 1877, the Staffordshire Football Association was established to provide association football in North Staffordshire with greater governance, including establishing a cup competition and adopting Sheffield Rules. Regional football associations played a central role in the growth of the game in England during the final decades of the nineteenth century, yet few scholars have sought to investigate their functions, activities and impact. This paper begins to address this gap in the literature by examining the formative years of the Staffordshire FA and exploring how it influenced the development of the game in North Staffordshire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds new light on return migration from Australia to the UK in the latter nineteenth century. It uses data from shipping records, and from a random sample of the 23,000 Australian‐born in the 1911 Census of England and Wales. Based on these sources, it estimates some 20% of migrants to Australia returned: higher among the wealthy, but still 12% of semi‐ and unskilled working class migrants returned. There was a preponderance of women among returnees. From that, and other evidence such as the geographic spread of returnees across England, the paper argues that social networks played critical roles in decisions to return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of sport is afflicted by myths that have become entrenched in our collective knowledge and are widely perceived as being the 'truth' with many having acquired a power and resilience that has allowed them to endure and persist, quite often despite academic research to the contrary. This paper considers the traditional narratives that present Stoke City Football Club as being the second oldest surviving professional football club in England, having supposedly been established in 1863, a suggestion that was heavily promoted through the official club website and various media outlets. It assesses how this myth has become entrenched and provides evidence that drastically alters our analysis of how the club developed. The findings of the paper, especially in relation to the 'origins of football' debate, also challenge the long-held views of how football in the region developed during the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Against a background of the various definitions of drawing and design offered in the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1754), the author argues that 'design', as applied to the manufacture of wallpapers at the end of the eighteenth century, is not so much a thing, either representation or pattern, as a means of communication between parties. The direct and indirect pressure exerted by the market is examined, and the role of the entrepreneur is considered, as is the importance of the ready availability of design in foundation across manufactured goods and competitive emulation between them. Finally, and with particular reference to arabesque wallpapers, the specific role of the designer is considered. The structure of the paper reverses traditional expectations and priorities, which have generally focused on the designer rather than on clients or manufacturers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a wealth of academic research focusing on the origins and development of association football in Britain during the nineteenth century, academics have failed to reach a consensus regarding the early history of the game with the emergence of contrasting ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ interpretations. Much of the current research has focused on tackling the subject on a national level and this has resulted in many towns, cities and regions across the country being overlooked when sports historians discuss the origins of modern football. One such region is North Staffordshire, more commonly referred to as The Potteries, which, despite having played a key role in the formation of the Football League, possessing one of the oldest professional football clubs in the country and an early county football association, has never been the subject of an in-depth academic study. Using a range of archival sources this paper provides an overview of the origins and early development of association football across The Potteries from the 1850 to 1870s, emphasizing the influence of Stoke City Football Club and provides a fact based resolution to the debate surrounding the club’s origin and formation. The wider development of the game in The Potteries is also explored, tracing the early informal football activities taking place at fairs, fetes and the wakes holidays to the establishment of a football culture in the 1870s following the formation of organized football clubs and the Staffordshire Football Association. This paper concludes that neither the orthodox nor the revisionist interpretations of the game’s origins can fully explain the region’s football development and that further research into the region is required to understand the significance of The Potteries in relation to the national picture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article continues research into social mobility in England in the nineteenth century by examining the links with different occupational structures, socio-economic and industry/occupation, for a specific location. This allows an examination of the impact of the characteristics of these structures on occupational and thence on social mobility. Occupational mobility has long been recognised as a major determinant of social mobility and has been the subject of a number of papers, usually to determine how much a specific variable affects the level and type of mobility observed. Rarely do these analyses consider the location’s occupational structure, and its changes, as a determinant of the level of mobility. This paper finds that much of the variability of occupational mobility of a locality is determined by the characteristics of the different industries and occupations in that location. Industries and occupations provide a context within which other factors, such as literacy, operate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Incorporation with limited liability enabled companies to ‘lock-in’ their financial capital’ and then invest in the long-term, highly specific investments on which the modern industrial economy would be based. The level of benefit varied from country to country, according to the way that the concept of capital lock-in, or maintenance, was defined in the legal systems concerned. In the UK, the concept was not well defined in early company legislation and challenges were raised through the courts during the late nineteenth century. Some of these, the ‘dividend cases’, have been quite widely considered in the literature but direct reductions of share capital, or capital reduction schemes, have received far less attention, even though they raised fundamental issues concerning long-term dividend positions, the accounting treatment of accumulated losses, depreciation and asset values and had important effects on the development of the capital maintenance doctrine and on shareholder class rights. The purpose of this paper is to question whether this literature adequately captures judicial influences on the development of the capital maintenance doctrine in England during the latter part of the nineteenth century, given the limited attention that has been paid to date to the leading capital reduction cases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research paper considers the history of a particular moment in the development of the interior decoration/design business. Although the history of interior design practice has been well charted as 'art/design history,' the business and professional history has been somewhat neglected, except for work on particular firms. The issues examined relate to four particular aspects. The first covers the distinctions between decorators, upholsterers, furnishers, and architects and how these differences were reflected in the work undertaken. Related to this is a brief examination of why many architects ignored interior work. Secondly, is the nature of the customer base and how it reacted in response to changing social and economic factors. Thirdly, there are the issues of marketing and promotion that were aimed at a much wider audience than architects would expect, and finally a consideration of the house furnisher as a foundation for the development of the professional interior decorator/designer. To address these issues, the paper offers an overview of the rise, maturity, and change of the house furnisher as the most important contributor to the supply of interior design/decoration advice and products in the second half of the nineteenth century. By taking case studies of important players in the field, the paper will consider why architects gave up their role as arbiters of taste in interior works, and how the house furnishing businesses took over. This is of some interest as it not only explores an issue that still remains in the interior design world-the notion of who controls the work, but also explores the nature and pre-history of professional interior design service providers in the period. Although the scope of this essay is potentially wide ranging, it is limited to the second half of the nineteenth century and focuses on London for its case studies. Through a consideration of primary sources, often using the trade press for commentaries, a sense of the contemporary issues is made. In addition, the recent work by scholars in the field is used to interpret the changes described. As a foundation for the subsequent development of a profession, the house furnisher had laid a number of ground rules. Apart from the issue of the control of work, they encouraged the development of specialized knowledge, and they recognized the importance of training and education, and to some extent, exercised control of access to the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mid-to-late Victorian England the footballers of the city of Sheffield created one of the earliest and most vibrant sub-cultures. The extent of midweek football and the types of crowd disorder in Sheffield football around that time provide two of the more interesting areas for study. The first section of this paper attempts to examine the custom of Saint Monday, the practice of utilizing the first day of the working week as a time for leisure activities, in Sheffield between the years 1876 and 1886. This is attempted through the detailed study of midweek football matches played by clubs from the city and its surrounds during those years. Although Monday will be the principal focus, other midweek days will also come under scrutiny. Secondly there is an attempt to provide a qualitative analysis of football crowd behaviour in Sheffield prior to 1892. The author seeks to add to the 'football hooliganism' debate by commenting on existing work carried out in this area dealing with incidents before that date. This section of the paper argues that reported incidents during this period appear to have been relatively few though authors of similar studies appear to have considerably underplayed their seriousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carl Schorlemmer (1834-1892), the first professor of organic chemistry in the Owens College, Manchester (and in England), was the prominent Anglo-German chemist and historian of chemistry of the second half of the 19th century. He studied the constitution of paraffinic hydrocarbons. The purpose of this paper is to familiarize readers with the important events in the life of Schorlemmer and his research activities and writing, in particular some of his experimental results, as well as his selected publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pollard and Robertson thought that the smaller, northern ‘company town’, in which the employers had greater control over employees and their wage rates, particularly suited the shipbuilding industry. The prosperity of all these towns was greatly affected by the fortunes of the local shipyard and some would have hardly existed at all but for the firms concerned. Employment in Palmers Brothers (later Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Co. Ltd) yard, early pioneers of the vertical integration of iron production and shipbuilding, was central to the spectacular growth of Jarrow, on the southern bank of the Tyne, between 1851 and 1921. Palmers was Britain’s largest shipbuilders by the 1880s, and they specialised in the construction of ships for the Admiralty before and during the First World War. They remained a major firm in the early post-war period yet, by 1933, had failed so badly that the town’s name would become synonymous with industrial decline and distress. Using a wide range of archival sources, the paper examines the factors that made Palmer’s initially so successful and those that were later to bring about its failure as a business and to have such major effects on the town in which they operated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, drawing upon a wide range of unpublished archival sources, I present a detailed reconstruction of Fountain Court and its residents, William and Catherine Blake during the period William and Catherine Blake were resident at No. 3 Fountain Court (c. 1820-27). The paper presents important new information concerning the society and milieu in Fountain Court and its neighbourhood during 1820-27. This fresh archival evidence enables us to identify and precisely locate for the first time the 'humble but respectable' fellow lodgers and neighbours living in Fountain Court during William and Catherine Blake's period of residence, and provides a detailed picture of life in the Blakes' neighbourhood during this period, and of trades conducted in the court, as well as the close familial and social relationships existing between a number of households immediately surrounding the Blakes' residence. Such relationships provide a context for William and Catherine's own relationships with their brother-in-law and landlord at 3 Fountain Court, Henry Banes and his wife Sarah Banes (née Boucher) and two of their neighbours and fellow lodgers in the court, the carver and gilder John George Lohr, and Blake's employer and fellow artist John Barrow. The Blakes' last residence was not in a sleepy, forgotten backwater, as some contemporary accounts and later biographers appear to suggest. As my paper demonstrates, Fountain Court in the 1820s, leading directly off the Strand, a major commercial thoroughfare of the largest metropolis of the period, was comprised of a small community, thriving with social and commercial activity. The reconstruction provides a detailed immediate context in which to view afresh William and Catherine's years living and working in Fountain Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the publics associated with commercial art galleries in Victorian London, focusing on the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The relationship between the gallery and its publics is framed by the larger issue of the relationship between art and commerce, driven by such questions as: Who was art for? Who constituted art's public(s)? Did commerce interfere with or facilitate art's desired publics? Did commerce taint or strengthen art? I argue that commercial art galleries reveal the disjuncture of the Victorian age, inherited from the eighteenth century, between practices that advanced private interests and rhetoric that demanded the commercial sector serve the needs of the public, foster sociability, advance the arts, and benefit the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1837, the sporting landscape of England was populated by a number of professional pedestrians who competed in a range of events that were extensively covered in the sporting press. These men distinguished themselves from their competitors through their use of ‘colours’ and a range of different athletic clothing. In the later stages of the nineteenth century, the dominance of the professional athlete was challenged through the formation of clubs and associations by a public-school- and university-educated middle class. The somatotype and clothing strategies of the Victorian athlete altered as a result. Their assumption of an innate physical superiority, allied to a preference for the all-rounder with his elegance and style, rather than the muscular, specialized sporting bodies of working-class professionals, were important features of an amateur ethos which drew much of its references from the Classical world. Through a discussion of how middle-class amateur athletes used Classical precedents, science and clothing to create the ‘university athlete’ and the ‘university costume’, in order to reinforce the distinctions between their own bodies and those of the professionals, this paper explores the transition from pedestrianism to organized athletics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this paper is to test the commonly made, but not well evidenced, assertion that the English and Welsh census data relating women's work is largely unreliable. This paper explores the hypothesis that when women were ‘regularly employed’ their occupations were fully enumerated in the 1851 census. There is considerable evidence to suggest that women's part-time, seasonal and casual work was not always recorded in the nineteenth century censuses. Rather than being seen as evidence of inaccuracy, it is argued here that these omissions indicate that householders were following the census instructions. In the years 1851–1881, these instructions requested that only the occupations of women who were ‘regularly employed’ be recorded. Comparing the listings of a mid-nineteenth century trade directory of Hertfordshire with the Census Enumerator's Books (CEBs) for the same county, this paper presents the results of new empirical research, and a method which provides a means to test systematically the recording of occupations of women who appear to be ‘regularly employed’. The key finding of this research is that, of the women who could be found in the CEBs, over 95% were recorded with an occupational descriptor. This suggests that the apparent unreliability of the census enumeration of women's work in the census of England and Wales may have been overstated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the history of local government in England (as opposed to the United Kingdom) since the early nineteenth century, and explores five long-term trends in its evolution. These are path dependence; the occurrence of major structural change; the phenomenon of policy reversal; the treatment of urban areas; and resistance to regional government. The author concludes that throughout the period under study, policy towards local government has exhibited a 'pendulum effect', with two opposing emphases operating in a sequential, rather than a simultaneous manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turnspit dog, an extinct breed, powered English roasting spits from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by rotating an apparatus comparable to a hamster wheel. It was not merely a working breed, however. It was an animal labourer. Breeders bred it solely for work. Contemporaries conceived of it as an industrious worker intrinsic to food production. Despite its importance, owners treated it contemptuously due to its utilitarian nature. Cooks replaced the dog with a machine, the smoke-jack, once the latter proved reliable. Rather than repackage it as a companion, the English ceased breeding it due to its inextricable connection with a disparaged trade. Industrialisation's upheaval triggered the turnspit's extinction by 1850. Examining its decline explicates how technological unemployment wrought catastrophic change on nonhumans. Elucidating comparable disturbances within cottage industry labour for canines and English workers provides scholars with a more-than-human understanding of industrialisation's ramifications. Furthermore, uniting animal and labour history reconceives current theorisations of historical animals, affirms working animals' past contributions and highlights their importance as labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on material collected in the Record Office at the Liverpool Public Library and its bearing on local business history in England. Sparseness of industry in the collection, since the nineteenth century was marked by commercial growth rather than industrial development; Way that personal papers often illuminate some aspects of business.

This article uses the Spanish marriages episode of 1846 as a prism through which to examine the relationship between the leading foreign affairs writers for the increasingly powerful Times newspaper and the authors and servants of British diplomacy in the early Victorian period. The focus of this study is Lord William Hervey, the first secretary of the British embassy in Paris, a diplomat who well understood the power of the press over ministers, parliament and the people. Hervey's under-utilized private papers shed light on the divisions in British political and literary (press) society over the nation's policies towards France and Spain. They also paint a picture of an increasingly isolated foreign secretary, Viscount Palmerston, a Whig statesman who failed to carry his policy through the Whig cabinet and who failed to convince the Conservative Times of its supposed merits, despite the support of some overactive members of the British diplomatic community. This is a story of diplomatic failure; a rare study of how not to win friends and influence people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Times was a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper phenomenon, defeating rival London newspapers through its skilful management, advanced technology, greater editorial resources and access to powerful politicians. Its authority enabled it to make and break governments. However, the uniqueness of The Times limits its usefulness as a historical source. This article begins with a brief history of The Times, before analysing how the newspaper remains centre stage in the historiography of journalism and of nineteenth-century culture more broadly, despite the digitization of provincial and other London papers. Over-dependence on The Times, it argues, has exaggerated the significance of London daily newspapers and underplayed the importance of weekly papers, particularly those published outside London. The Times was unusual because it was a metropolitan rather than provincial paper, with a focus on political news and a dearth of lighter, broader content, or news of events around the UK. Using quantitative analysis of recent scholarship, the article demonstrates that unwarranted conclusions are still drawn from over-use of this source and from a wider view that it was representative of nineteenth-century newspapers in general. The conclusion urges a more geographically and culturally nuanced approach to Victorian newspapers, beyond a metropolitan-focused political and cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on social and art history, cultural studies and ‘gaze theory’ to explore how William Powell Frith's painting of Derby Day, and the various responses to it, shed light on the Epsom Derby horse race and the ways in which its multiple meanings as a mega-event were produced and exchanged in Victorian society. It continues the recent trend of using a wider range of visual methodologies to explore the history of sport. It begins by setting the painting in its cultural, social and racing context, and exploring how the painting was created by Frith. It moves on to explore some of its possible readings, and analysing some of the different gazes through which the meanings of the painting can be read, including those of the artist, the characters, the critics and the spectators visiting the work. In so doing themes such as class, gender, reception and spectatorship, the relationship between popular and elite culture, and the representation of workers, women and ethnic minorities are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article transcripts and comments a hitherto unpublished letter by David Ricardo, dated 19 January 1823 and addressed to Grenfell. In this letter Ricardo opposes the adoption of a double standard of money, two years after the return to convertibility of banknotes and in the midst of an economic recession that pressed for drastic monetary changes. It contains an argument – linking the double standard of money, the seignorage on the silver coin, the behaviour of the Bank of England, and the fall in the value of the pound – which is to be found nowhere else in Ricardo's works. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper confronts many years of displacement-based readings of Charlotte Bront&s Shirley (1849) with a historicized "surface reading" that connects the manual labor of two very distinct constituencies in the novel: hardened Luddite machine breakers and dispossessed middle-class women. A surface-level line of inquiry into manufactured objects reveals an inverted network from the mill to the parlor; the redundancy of human hands caused by mechanization in the mill is concurrent with a surplus of female handiwork in the novel's middle-class homes. I argue that this inversion makes sense if we situate the novel in its 1811-12 setting--the unique historical moment when the term "manufacture" began to accrue paradoxically opposed meanings. Brontë's oscillation between mechanized and manual forms of manufacture in Shirley marks the early boundaries of what would eventually become the rigidly defined separate spheres of mid-century Victorian life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At just after six in the evening on 16 June 1851, a balloon carrying two passengers narrowly avoided crashing into the transept of the Crystal Palace. This near-disastrous balloon ascent was the result of just one of the popular entertainments that sprang up to capitalize on the crowds of visitors to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851. Despite the fact that on this occasion popular entertainment and didactic recreation almost literally collided, histories of the Exhibition have kept the two separate. It is notable that today the Great Exhibition is most often studied through sources such as Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Fxhibition of 1851 (1852), the Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue (1851), or the Illustrated London News, all aimed at middle-class audiences. However, cheap broadside ballads also commented on the Exhibition and offer alternative perspectives on the event. This paper focuses on these neglected sources and reads them within a broader network of literary and visual sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper takes the case of John and Elizabeth Shaw, early nineteenth-century English hardware factors. The sources are almost 200 hundred letters written by the Shaws and their circle. Using these, two readings of the Shaws' experiences of creating a business are presented. The first is couched within a narrative structure of plotted stages and finds the Shaws starting, struggling to, and ultimately succeeding in creating a successful business. Here, their actions within a nascent industrialized economy can be described as entrepreneurial – they successfully pursued opportunity through founding an enterprise within economically and technologically auspicious environments. The second, more phenomenological reading, opens up for consideration the questionableness of their experience of ‘being in business’. Here the Shaws' understanding of themselves (as conveyed in personal letters) brings into question the academic tendency to emplot their story as one of the staged growth and profitability. Specifically, it resists attempts to ascribe to their experience entrepreneurial status, not simply because they did not think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but because the appearance of the business for the Shaws was woven with their lives in ways that belie the narrative direction and coherence that concepts like entrepreneurship give to it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]