Samuel Pepys, blogger: Happy Birthday

"23 February 1659/60. Thursday, my birthday, now twenty-seven years." I almost missed the birthday of Samuel Pepys. Pepys, as you probably know, blogged his Diary from January 2003 until May 2012, and his site is maintained by Phil Gyford. Gyford began the whole thing again, with new software, in January 2013, as he explains in a posting on his own site. We wish Pepys and Gyford well.

Pepys, App

Yesterday, I began a (very) brief talk to our department Careers Day about blogging in the 17th and 21st centuries, with "What News?": Pepys’s repeated query to acquaintances and bystanders as he walked daily between the City of London and the court of Whitehall in Westminster, according to his diary from the 1660s. (I should note that Pepys is not only a blog, but also an app, reviewed here.) What was Pepys seeking? I suggested that what he was after was not facts, not history, but rumor/gossip. If it was nailed down, it was not au courant, and of less interest to him. Anyway, Pepys would have made a good blogger (and I guess he does).

Black Early Modern London: "Concrete Slaveship" or "Freedom Street"?

Royal Trumpeters, including
black trumpeter John Blanke (1511)

A bit unusual to bring in Aswad or the incomparable Ken Boothe to the rarefied world of early modern historians (instead of Freedom Street, the London reference should probably be Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue," but never mind). But the excuse is an announcement regarding an episode of Michael Woods' "The Great British Story," which focuses on race (“Britain’s First Black Community,” BBC News Magazine, July 20, 2012). The video itself is not available in my area, but the piece has some interesting detail about the presence of Black Londoners, especially in the Elizabethan period, some 25 in St Botolph Aldgate alone (Wood draws from Guildhall Library's set of parish register entries "Black and Asian people discovered in records held by the Manuscripts Section"). The story provided for the entire early modern period is sketchy, at least it includes little detail for the 17th century. But, by the end of the period, "[b]y the 18th Century, it is thought as many as 20,000 black servants lived in London."

May Fair, London (1716, detail)

So where is this story of Black Londoners in our own textbook, Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), or in any major textbooks of the period? We discuss the African slave trade, but the only mention that I recall of anything to do with Blacks within the British Isles is mention of Ferdinando Gorges, known as "King of the Blacks," who retired back to Herefordshire with profits from Caribbean plantations in the late 17th century. As we have been contracted for third editions of the textbook and sourcebook, let me assure you that conversations about this will be had, betwixt Bob and Newton.

But, returning to Aswad and Boothe, the meta-narrative of this story is not clear. Did Blacks in early modern London experience Freedom Street, or a new subaltern situation in the Concrete (sic) Slaveship of the London streets? Note, again, two sentences from the Wood article/announcement:

Bacchus and Venus: or, a select
collection of near 200... songs and catches
in love and gallantry (1737,
courtesy of Angela McShane)

• "Employed especially as domestic servants, but also as musicians, dancers and entertainers, their numbers ran to many hundreds, maybe even more.
  And let's be clear - they were not slaves. In English law, it was not possible to be a slave in England (although that principle had to be re-stated in slave trade court cases in the late 18th Century, like the "Somersett" case of 1772)."

Was the entire period some sort of incipient Somersett case, where setting foot on English soil made one free? Or, were they free at best to be servants or some sort of exotic entertainer?
Perhaps the numbers are too small to make a final judgement. But, then, all the more reason to be sure that the meta-narrative of "it was not possible to be a slave in England," meets the reality of the baptism of "Thomas Sambo, Mr Heywood’s black boy," 29 October 1710.

[Update: followup here.]

Goldman Sachs and Goldsmith Vyner

In honor of my joining Facebook to further some committee work (and noting Goldman Sachs investment in same, as well as their role "in contributing to the worst US economic crisis since the 1930s"), I offer the following doggerel made by an anonymous critic of Sir Robert Vyner (presumably in the 1670s)

• Cursed be the banker and hanged the covetous banker
• That like a fatal rust or cancer
• That viper-like through mothers' bowels eat
• Their way to private wealth and hope to cheat
• Abused mankind with glorious words.

[The source may be BL Add. MS. 34,362, Poems 1679-1681.  But I draw it from David Allen, "Bridget Hyde and Lord Treasurer Danby's Alliance with Lord Mayor Vyner," Guildhall studies in London history 2, 1 (1975): 16.]




The Family of Sir Robert Vyner, by John Michael Wright (d.1694)

Talking Heads / Housing Coffee

Perhaps because of the publication Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (Yale University Press, 2005); Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (Phoenix, 2005), etc., but more probably because of the expansion of blogs (and the decline of newspapers) had everyone scrambling back to an earlier age and technology of communication shift (from newsbooks to newspapers, from taverns to coffeehouses).  In any case, the last five years have seen numerous online musings:  Coffee-houses vs. Salons; a review of Cowan considering the Coffeehouse Mob; a discussion of the public sphere From the Coffee House to the World Wide Web (though I am unsure how the image Hogarth's Treating fits, given that that is clearly a tavern/private dining room); Notes on Coffee (though perhaps it should be titled Notes on Habermas); a long article "Coffee and Civilization," by Scott Horton (Harper's, August 20, 2007); and recently "Coffee Society."

The concluding chapter of Bucholz and Key, Early Modern England discusses coffee-houses quite a bit, in relation to London's mercantile and insurance developments, aristocratic sociability, and, of course, the nascent public sphere. I worry whether coffeehouses can be all things to all people; but they certainly were a prominent early modern feature.  (We don't use the picture at left in Early Modern England or Sources and Debates, though I believe it is circa 1705.)  For more on coffeehouses and modernity, see Drinking as Enlightenment? (below).  To resist the Whiggish idea that coffeehouses developed everything new about the modern public sphere, see Philip Withington, Society in Early Modern England (Polity Press, 2010), 235, where everything "associated with the Enlightenment coffeehouse had been promulgated through the council chambers and parish vestries of England for the previous one hundred years"!

Early Modern London Re-visioned

Received notice of an exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery. London’s Water: 400 Years of the New River, which, they note, "a display charting the history of the river and the New River Company’s role in supplying water to the capital."

The work to the right, new to me, is an anonymous work titled "A Prospect of the City from the North, c.1730."  (The link to the City of London's Collage provides a larger image and a fuller description.)

Drinking as Enlightenment?

• People often credit their ideas to individual “Eureka!” moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His tour takes us from the “liquid networks” of London’s coffee houses to Charles Darwin’s long, slow hunch to today’s high-velocity web. ("Where good ideas come from: Steven Johnson"; TEDGlobal, July 2010, Oxford, 17:46)

This podcast (blog talk?) begins in early modern England, as all digital humanities should I suppose.  Dr. Johnson (not that one) makes a couple of suspect claims.  First, the Oxford coffeehouse probably dates from 1654 not 1651 (as most claim); and the first coffeehouse in the British Isles was probably in London about the same time [Brian Cowan, "Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse," History Compass 5, 4 (June 2007): 1180–213]. Second, coffeehouses (like taverns) often had private rooms and/or high-backed boxes as well as a public table(s) [John Barrell, “Coffee-House Politicians,” JBS 43, 2 (2004): 206-32].  So we cannot state that coffeehouses always privileged openness ("connecting) over proprietariness ("property").  The talk does point to the importance of examining spaces, sociability, and networks, however.  Then and now.

When Worlds Collide: Early Modern Word Up

It is with some surprise that I discover in the latest email newsletter from UK music magazine Word a link to the new London Lives 1690-1820: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis.

According to the Project Staff:

• London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances. Facilities are provided to allow users to link together records relating to the same individual, and to compile biographies of the best documented individuals. 

Eventually it will be integrated with an even larger set of databases, as described in Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500–1900.  London Lives should be added to the bibliography of online works in the 2nd ed. of Sources and Debates (and would be useful for students working on late Stuart social and cultural issues, ch. 9).

One caveat, the organizers promise a wiki to help markup and transcription.  A quick test of my father's name reveals the following:

• From a Court holden at the said Hospital of Bridewell on Friday the 6th. of March 1746/7 
• Edward BellamyEdward Bellamy      being Charged by the Oath of Harry KeyHarry Key      at the Wheatsheaf in Cornhill Linnen Draper being a Disorderly Personand Pilferring and Old Hall of small Value his Property. 

That clearly should be "an old hatt" (Bellamy appears to have stolen Harry's hat).  Amazingly, London Lives provides a photo of the original MS. minute book on the same webpage (with a handy zoom) and, indeed, that is what is written.  Amazing source.