The Time Revolutionaries of 1859

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Clive Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Water Supply ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Freezing Time ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Unlimited Time ◽  
Conflicting Interests

The three principals, their partners, families, and networks are introduced. The chapter uses Darwin’s explanation of natural selection in 1857: ‘We have almost unlimited time; no-one but a practical geologist can fully appreciate this.’ Evans, Lubbock, and Prestwich were all practical geologists but with conflicting interests in managing London’s water supply for health and business. The chapter explores their geological passion and how they came to investigate the question of great human antiquity—the crux of the time revolution. The idea of using stone tools as a proxy for remote human ancestors is examined and the challenges which faced them set out. The characters of the principals are mapped onto the ideals in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, where zeal and perseverance sum up the qualities of success in all walks of life. George Eliot’s observations in Adam Bede on the men of New Leisure provides another fit for the three time revolutionaries. The preoccupation of the mid-nineteenth century with time is also examined using three inventions, the railways and railway time, shrinking distance—and hence time—by telegraphy, and freezing time with photographs. Examples range across literature and engineering.

Stone Tools

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Old World ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.

Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Josephine Hoegaerts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
National Language ◽  
Systematic Observation ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.

Genealogy of the Cerebral Subject

Being Brains ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Vidal ◽  
Francisco Ortega
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Brain Structure And Function ◽  
Cerebral Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Function ◽  
Cerebral Self ◽  
The Brain

The first chapter proposes to trace the distant roots of the cerebral subject to the late seventeenth century, and particularly to debates about the seat of the soul, the corpuscularian theory of matter, and John Locke’s philosophy of personal identity. In the wake of Locke, eighteenth century authors began to assert that the brain is the only part of the body we need to be ourselves. In the nineteenth century, this form of deterministic essentialism contributed to motivate research into brain structure and function, and in turn confirmed the brain-personhood nexus. Since then, from phrenology to functional neuroimaging, neuroscientific knowledge and representations have constituted a powerful support for prescriptive outlooks on the individual and society. “Neuroascesis,” as we call the business that sells programs of cerebral self-discipline, is a case in point, which this chapter also examines. It appeals to the brain and neuroscience as bases for its self-help recipes to enhance memory and reasoning, fight depression, anxiety and compulsions, improve sexual performance, achieve happiness, and even establish a direct contact with God. Yet underneath the neuro surface lie beliefs and even concrete instructions that can be traced to nineteenth-century hygiene manuals.

Self-Help and the Helpless Subject

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Industrial Age

Cara E. Murray, “Self-Help and the Helpless Subject: Samuel Smiles and Biography’s Objects” (pp. 481–508) This essay examines how the changing relationship between human subjects and industrial objects in the industrial age redraws the conventions of the most influential strand of nineteenth-century biography, self-help. It argues that Samuel Smiles’s greatest contribution to biography, self-help, arises from his initial recognition of how, in an industrial age, objects shape subjects, and then from his subsequent demonstration of how subjects surmount that very phenomenon. By tracing the strides that Smiles makes in his biographical project from his earliest speeches in the mid-1840s, and then to his technical and biographical writings of the following decade, to his synthesis of these two forms in Self-Help (1859), this essay demonstrates how Smiles develops the genre of self-help out of writing about men’s changing relation to objects. It argues that Self-Help teaches the paradoxical lesson that at the height of industrialization men no longer need to depend upon machines. With this message, Self-Help invigorates biography by providing it with the ideological purpose of teaching Victorians that in the age of machines man can help himself.

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