The Preston Cock, Adultery, Homophobia and the First Petition for Female Suffrage

2021 ◽  
Vol 170 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
John Belchem
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
Married Men ◽  
Mutual Conversion ◽  
William Cobbett

Originally spurred by determination to bring the Manchester authorities to justice in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, Henry Hunt persisted in seeking to gain election for the popular constituency of Preston. Eventually successful in 1830, he entered parliament pledged to present every petition sent to him, including that from Mary Smith calling for female suffrage. Having provided a rational vindication of the rights of women, her petition descended into a diatribe against married men who indulged in homosexual acts to the despair of their suicidal wives. This was a thinly veiled reference to alleged goings on in the household of the radical journalist William Cobbett. This article seeks to place in context the allegations and subsequent heated controversy by examining the long-term relationship between Hunt and Cobbett, dating back to the early nineteenth century and their mutual conversion from loyalism to radicalism. Already strained by the longstanding animus of Cobbett’s wife towards Hunt on account of his adulterous domestic circumstances, the radical allies were increasingly at odds in the years after Peterloo, divided over political and personal issues in a bewildering and increasingly unrestrained manner. Jealous of Hunt’s electoral success at Preston and furious with his radical condemnation of the Reform Bill, Cobbett inveighed against the ‘Preston Cock’. Hunt responded in kind, repeating allegations soon taken up in Mary Smith’s petition. Historians have simply noted how the petition was greeted with derision, but as this article shows, it merits deeper study. An early milestone on the long journey to secure votes for women, Mary Smith’s petition reveals political, personal and sexual divisions in early nineteenth-century radicalism - over feminism, homosexuality and adultery - attitudes and prejudices which inhibited any decisive pre-Victorian advance beyond manhood suffrage. The article concludes with a postscript noting Hunt’s fall from favour as the Reform Bill was passed, losing his Preston seat in the first election under the new propertied franchise. He died shortly thereafter but was rehabilitated and revered a few years later by the Chartists. His presentation of the first petition for female suffrage has seemingly been lost from history.

scholarly journals “The Great End of All Government…”: Working People's Construction of Citizenship Claims in Early Nineteenth-Century England and the Matter of Class

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (S3) ◽  
pp. 19-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc W. Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Manual Labour ◽  
Working People ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Right ◽  
William Cobbett ◽  
A Share

In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. “[I]f you labour honestly,” he counselled, “you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]”. For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, “The greatest right […] of every man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit”. Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: “Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]”.

scholarly journals Native and Non-native Saints in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Irish-Language Charm Historiolas

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-334
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Strong Link ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

AbstractAn examination of surviving healing charm texts originating in Ireland between 1700 and the mid-nineteenth century suggests a strong link between the contents of this corpus and a select few national saints (Columcille, Bridget, and Patrick) and international Catholic religious figures (Christ, Mary, and the Apostles). By contrast, local Irish saints, which otherwise figure so prominently in religious practices of the time, are significantly underrepresented in the Irish charm corpus of this time period. This essay looks at the long-term status of highly localized saints in religious and medical discourse, the effect of church centralization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the rise of select national saints as factors in this feature of the Irish charms.

Thomas Chalmers, David Nasmith, and the Origins of the City Mission Movement

2004 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Ian J. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Lay Leadership ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Mission ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mission Movement ◽  
The City

The development of important models for urban mission took place in early nineteenth-century Glasgow. Thomas Chalmers’ work is widely known, but that of David Nasmith has been the subject of less study. This article explores the ideas shared by Chalmers and Nasmith, and their influence on the development of the city mission movement. Areas of common ground included the need for extensive domestic visitation, the mobilisation of the laity including a middle- class lay leadership, efficient organisation, emphasis on education, and discerning provision of charity. In the long term Chalmers struggled to recruit and retain sufficient volunteers to sustain his parochial urban mission scheme. However, Nasmith’s pan-evangelical scheme succeeded in attracting a steady stream of lay recruits to work as city missioners, as well as mission directors. Through their agency a significant attempt was made to reach those amongst the urban masses who had little or no church connection.

Narrative

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shared Narrative

This chapter reviews the publication history of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genre of Pacific travel narratives, and examines its narrative features. During this period, ships moved with increasing regularity on incredibly risky voyages between the world’s oceans. At the same time, novels came to dominate the literary world of fiction. These developments are related by their shared narrative dynamics, especially in the relationship between narrative suspense and numerical speculation, between words and numbers. The short-term risks and losses that attended these voyages were offset by their long-term profits, as the pleasure of accumulation concealed but also depended on the horrors of violence.

From Colony to Republic: a Case Study in Bureaucratic Change

1973 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Lofstrom
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodic Repetition

It is axiomatic, but certainly deserving of periodic repetition, that the long-term configuration of political, social and economic institutions in Iberian America has been determined both by the apparatus, operation and rationale of the metropolitan state, as well as by the premises and patterns of colonization. Equally apparent is the premise that the politico-administrative crisis associated with the achievement of independence in early nineteenth-century Latin America must be studied in the light of this ‘set’ of New World institutions, and particularly in relation to what Richard Morse calls the Spanish patrimonial state.

From begums and bibis to abandoned females and idle women

2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Wald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Military

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a proliferation of laws in colonial India which targeted women deemed to be prostitutes. As the number of laws grew, so too did the category of ‘prostitute’. Yet, before the nineteenth century, it would have been difficult to identify many of these women or their activities as criminal, or even immoral. This article examines how such legal boundaries and conceptualisations came to be formulated. It suggests that the ‘prostitute’ category in India was shaped by the repeated failure of the East India Company's surgeons and officers to control venereal disease among the European soldiery. Such attempts at disease control were experimented with from the late eighteenth century and, as this article argues, were keys in the later formulation of the Contagious Diseases Acts. This article traces the decline of long-term, monogamous relationships between European men and Indian women, and the corresponding rise in shorter-term sexual transactions in and around military cantonments. By grounding later legal shifts within the military medical context, we can clearly see the forces behind the social and moral changes surrounding this group of women in the early nineteenth century.

THE COAL QUESTION BEFORE JEVONS

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
FREDRIK ALBRITTON JONSSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Population Pressure ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Energy Regime ◽  
Fuel Demand ◽  
Coal Supply

AbstractIn the early nineteenth century, political economists, politicians, and geologists debated the size and duration of the British coal supply. For mineral Malthusians, the argument about a dwindling supply sharpened anxieties about population pressure, fuel demand, and limited resources. They introduced a new sense of geological limits and long-term obligations into the theology of atonement. But for cornucopian liberals, the shift to a mineral energy regime supplied a powerful refutation to the Malthusian forecast. Inexhaustible coal promised growth without end.

Explanations of Species Extinction in Nineteenth-Century China and Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Species Extinction ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Chinese Official ◽  
Natural Archive

This essay compares the articulation of the idea of species extinction in Europe and China. The idea of species extinction is usually assumed to have arisen first in late –eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Europe, contributing to Darwin’s formulation of his theory of natural selection as the basis for the evolution of species. This essay begins by citing Deng Qi’nan, a Chinese official writing in 1811, who also discussed species extinction—but who attributed the causes of species extinction to human action—and then explores the long-term historical context of changes to China’s environment that informed both the observation of species extinction in China and its attribution to human agency. The chapter concludes by considering whether a theory of species extinction that is grounded in science and “the natural archive” is more true than one grounded in research into the written records found in “the human archive.”

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