9. The two ‘Northern Industrial Tours of the 1790s’ addressed by Jon Mee’s chapter are John Aikin’s A Description of the Country s/r round Manchester (1795) and William Turner’s ‘Northern Tour’ (1797), works which focus on northern England and bear witness to late-eighteenth-century innovations in textile manufacturing, and their wider ramifications. Aikin’s Description sometimes displays a sense of wonder in the face of the new world that it discovers, and it conjoins ideas of ‘improvement’ and social progress, albeit that as Mee demonstrates, it acknowledges the underside of economic growth too, by recognizing not only the connections between investment capital and the slave trade but also the negative environmental impact created by the harnessing of technological ingenuity. Turner more than Aikin addressed the social implications of improvement, highlighting the emergence of a new ‘commercial aristocracy’, although like Aikin, Mee argues, he at the same time questioned his and others’ ability to grasp and make sense of the rapidity and scale of change.

This chapter traces the development of the essay in the context of a world of early eighteenth-century sociability constituted by coffee shops, periodicals, and a variety of informal clubs and societies. Never simply a reflection of a prior social reality, the periodical essay developed as part of a self-consciously created mythos of ‘polite literature’ designed to regulate manners in the inchoate and often contentious social world from which it represented itself as emerging. In the skilful hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, among others, the polite essay shaped values of agreeableness, conversability, and formal equality that helped define a remarkably durable idea of polite literary culture still in play – if increasingly represented as passing away – for essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt writing a century later.

Every age, perhaps, is an age of transition, but not every age is as anxiously and exquisitely conscious of this condition as the 1820s was. Contemporaries were quick to identify the decade as marking the passing of a more stable epoch and presaging the uncertain emergence of a new era. In an 1831 essay that, like many of its contemporaries, laboured to catch ‘The Spirit of the Age’, John Stuart Mill contended that ‘the first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of transition’. Shortly afterwards, Edward Bulwer Lytton, in England and the English, employed a more exact characterisation, describing his time as one of ‘visible and violent transition’. He warmed to the theme later in the book:

Such foreboding characterisations were not uncommon. In ‘Signs of the Times’, Thomas Carlyle saw Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as astonishing transformations in the order of things: ‘Those things seemed fixed and immovable—deep as the foundations of the world; and lo! in a moment they have vanished, and their place knows them no more!’

On the more optimistic side of the equation, Mill claimed that by the end of the 1820s a great change had ‘taken place in the human mind’. Looking forward to the Reform Bill of 1832, he celebrated the appearance of ‘new men, who insisted upon being governed in a new way’. Bulwer Lytton, on the other hand, was far from sanguine about the prospects of a reformed society:

‘Power’ appears as a key term in a founding definition of Romantic studies: Thomas De Quincey's distinction between a literature of power and a literature of knowledge. De Quincey's version of this distinction first appeared in his ‘Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected’. Published as a series of five letters over 1823 in the London Magazine, the letters frame an idea of true education against the mechanical acquisition of knowledge, associated in the second letter with the Dissenter Isaac Watts and ‘the sectarian zeal of his party in religion’. In the third letter, published in March 1823, De Quincey wrote: ‘All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature to communicate knowledge.’ He went on to explain that by communicating power he meant to feel ‘vividly and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting.’ A note gives credit for his use of the word ‘power’ to describe this interior resource to years of conversation with Wordsworth. Power for De Quincey comes to define ‘literature’ against what he calls ‘anti-literature’, defined in relation to the dizzying proliferation of print, ‘our present enormous accumulation of books’. Later elaborations of the distinction in a review of an edition of Alexander Pope for the North British Review in 1848 developed his complaint against mechanical systems into an opposition between ‘a literature of power’, identified with Wordsworth's poetry, and a ‘literature of knowledge’ explicitly associated with the steam engine: ‘A good steam-engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michel Angelo.’

The irony here is that when De Quincey first made his distinction in the 1820s the word ‘power’ was perhaps nowhere more prevalent in print than in discussions of the steam engine and the legacy of James Watt. Watt died in 1819, just two years before De Quincey first set out his distinction between ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’. Although the opposition between Wordsworth and Watt was not explicit in De Quincey's first knowledge/power distinction, it haunts his antagonism to mechanical method, his concern about the proliferation of print, and may even lurk as a homophone in his swipe at Isaac Watts.

The 1820s witnessed what contemporaries regarded as an unprecedented explosion of visual and theatrical spectacle. From the many panoramas of military and naval victories, especially of Trafalgar and Waterloo, to recently discovered marvels like the artefacts on display at Egyptian Hall in London from 1821, it was a decade where crowds flocked to novel forms of entertainment. These entertainments have sometimes been contrasted with an emptying-out of literary genres deemed more serious, but they were part of an emergent media ecology that placed great value on performance and included a wealth of writing about city life. Take Marguerite Blessington's The Magic Lantern, or Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1822), which describes a series of fashionable cultural sites, including the model tomb at Egyptian Hall, but pays as much attention to the audience displaying itself as to the objects on display. Her title speaks to the idea of London as a show in itself, a series of novel scenes or sketches driven by new media technologies. As in Pierce Egan's more famous Life in London (1821), there was a growing sense of a newly expanded audience for culture as itself a performance that readers were invited to enjoy, a sense that started to inflect broader ideas of social being and personal identity.

The coronation of George IV in 1821 set the tone of a theatrical decade, soon followed by his royal tour of Scotland in August 1822, an event much reproduced as a theatre spectacle, just as the coronation itself was soon adapted into rival panoramic versions that competed over the number of figures they displayed. Not that all was acclaim: George IV continued to be the target of a torrent of visual and verbal satires that presented him performing a variety of roles from Macbeth in 1820 to the Great Joss in 1829. Whatever the topical target of any of these attacks, each played on the idea of the monarch as the presiding spirit of a society of empty display and pretentious self-importance. The idea of George IV as ‘a sort of state-puppets [sic] or royal wax-work’, in William Hazlitt's words, tapped into a broader fear about the precarity of personal identity.

The introduction begins by addressing the uses of studying cultural institutions. It provides a working definition of ‘institution’ and a historical overview of the emergence of the infrastructure of institutions in the period 1700 to 1900. The logic of choosing the period is addressed in relation to the uneven translation from cultural institutions based on the court and church to voluntary institutions that had an arms-length relationship to the state. It also discusses the historical irony that just as a ‘romantic’ definition of the literary individualism emerged that might seem to pit literature against Institutions, there was a proliferation of institutions of literature. The purview of the collection in relation to British national and imperial culture and identities is explained and the opportunities for further work in related areas discussed in the framework of the collection’s own historical moment at a time when the university-based discipline of Literature seems to be undergoing a fundamental change in its structure and purposes.