The London Auction Mart and the Marketability of Real Estate in England, 1808–1864

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Fitz-Gibbon

AbstractThis article considers the cultural work of commoditization through the example of the London Auction Mart and the market for real estate in early nineteenth-century England. The auctioneers who founded this exchange sought to reconfigure the organization of property sales in an institution that would bring order and transparency to a world of informal institutions, local markets, and private exchange. The Auction Mart made visible the idea of a universal, abstract property market. At the same time, it offered a new social and cultural space in which to negotiate the often contradictory meanings of marketable property. This work of making the property market meaningful is told through institutional archives, published accounts, diaries, and estate correspondence.

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Conor Lucey

The Philadelphia architect and master builder Owen Biddle (1774–1806) contributed to the making of some of the early Republic's most important buildings and is best known as the author of one of the first American-authored architectural books. During the course of his relatively brief career, Biddle's achievements in architecture and theory were profoundly shaped by Philadelphia's distinctive, Quaker-influenced economic and artistic culture. Focusing on two hitherto unknown row houses built by Biddle between 1798 and 1801, Conor Lucey reveals for the first time the business and property interests of this important if enigmatic figure. Viewing Biddle's work against the socioeconomic backdrop of Federal-era Philadelphia, and drawing on previously unexplored archival material, Owen Biddle and Philadelphia's Real Estate Market, 1798–1806 situates Biddle's real estate ventures within the context of the city's early nineteenth-century building world. This study of Biddle's career as builder-developer expands our knowledge of his professional life and our understanding of the formation of his ideas.


2018 ◽  
pp. 168-207
Author(s):  
Conor Lucey

Having examined the building and decorating of the urban house, this chapter explores how the artisan approached marketing and selling real estate. As the first sustained analysis of property advertising in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world, this chapter first considers how regional variations and social demographics (aristocratic audiences in London and Dublin compared with merchant audiences in Boston and Philadelphia) dictated the form and content of property notices, reflecting on issues such as location, quality of structural and decorative finish, convenience, and decorum. But while house-building and house-selling were principally economic activities, representing the motivating force for building mechanics to enter the real estate market, the evidence from property advertisements reveals that builders were cognizant of the semantics of advertising rhetoric and employed a vocabulary that emulated that of auctioneers, luxury goods manufacturers and other polite retailers.


Author(s):  
James Emmett Ryan

Building on an ample foundation of (often feminist) revisionary literary scholarship, which over the last decade has fostered a substantial reexamination of “sentimental” texts created by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American novelists, recent studies of sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture have continued to expose its political import, social complications, gender paradoxes, and racial construction. Once dismissed as shallow tearjerkers, American sentimental novels, which often drew on the example of British fictional models from Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) andClarissa(1747-1748) to Charles Dickens'sA Christmas Carol(1843) andLittle Dorrit(1857-1858), have recently been recognized as “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture.” By now, Leslie Fiedler's despair in the face of the alleged artistic impoverishments of these books has been abandoned by many critics, who, bypassing or modifying Fiedler's aesthetic imperatives, now prefer to ask pointed questions about the “cultural work” that these books have performed within American society.


2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


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