"Hone and the Spy System"

Although Britain has always had some sort of domestic spy system, it reached an intensity of operation in the period following the ending of the Napoleonic wars, until the death of Queen Caroline. It seemed to many that Britain was on the eve of a revolution. This paper examined how the insidious nature of Sidmouth's Spy System damaged personal relationships and poisoned that of the two most successful radical polemicists of the day William Hone and William Cobbett

The Political Moment of Pierce Egan's Life in London (1820)

Life in London was first published in monthly parts in September 1820 and in boards from July 1821, with thirty-six cuts by George and Robert Cruikshank. It was hugely successful and it is estimated that there were over sixty imitations in the 1820s. The audience Life in London gained seems to have ranged from the Duke of York to labouring class children. Life in London was also made famous to people who had never read it through the theatre: various stage versions were shown on either side of the Atlantic—some of which survived well into the nineteenth century. This paper argues that Egan co-opted the kind of format that William Hone and George Cruikshank had used in their radical pamphlets, such as The Political House that Jack Built, to gain access to the huge cross-class audience that they had found and made. However Egan does this without the politics or gripes that Hone’s pamphlets contained. Instead Egan is interested in the highs and the lows of London life; the spectacle of London. The title page and frontispiece to Life in London herald this intermingling of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ by showing a variety of scenes and fonts. As John Strachan writes: Egan’s work is “notable for its typographic riot: the italics, small caps and exclamation points.” This usage of print technology to affect the mood and response of the reader, along with the pictures and the songs, makes Life in London a kind of multi-media experience

Liberalism

Paper on the roots of Liberalis

Shelley's Steamship

Description to be added.Cannot be left empt

‘My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar – I am a weaver boy to them’; Keats and Class

Hour long paper at Hills Road Sixth Form College on Keats and Class. This paper is about class, limiting oneself to their station and Keats’s response to that. I situate Keats in the period that he worked in and argue that he challenged snobbery by daring to write poetry

Three aspects of childhood autism: Mother-child interactions, autonomic responsivity, and cognitive functioning.

A survey of the current literature published in the field of childhood autism suggested that despite a rapidly expanding body of research, we have little definitive understanding of the aetiology of the condition or a highly efficacious treatment model. However, there is a growing consensus that the autistic child suffers from a primary organic impairment, resulting in particular deficiencies in cognition and language, and consequently he displays pronounced learn-ing difficulties. The literature survey also indicated that there is a lack of empirical data on the manner in which parents interact with their autistic child, including the contingencies they deliver upon his characteristic responses, and the influence of the child upon the adult's behaviour. Analysis of mother-child interactions were conducted therefore, using diads with normal and autistic children and their mothers. Differences were found between the behaviour of mothers of normal children and mothers of autistic children on a number of verbal and non-verbal measures relating to their mode of interaction with these children. Such data may have potential utility for the design of generalizable behavioural treatment programmes for autistic children, with parents as the primary charge agents. The second study involved an analysis of psycho-physiological data collected from a group of non-verbal autistic children who typically display infrequent, abnormal or unpredictable overt responses to important environmental events including traditional reinforcers, novelty and social stimulation. Autonomic data appeared suitable for determining the effects of such environmental stimuli, which also may have implications for treatment design and for an understanding of the aetiology of childhood autism. The third area of investigation consisted of three studies designed to investigate further the apparent deficits and abnormalities in cognitive functioning that have been reported recently in experimental research literature. These studies involved binary sequence learning, concept attainment and probability-learning tasks, and contrasted the performance of autistic children with normal and subnormal control subjects. It was concluded from these data that there is evidence of abnormalities in functioning on cognitive tasks and that they may be particularly related to the nature of strategies adopted in such tasks and the failure to utilise task-relevant information feedback in an appropriate manner

The Conspiracies of 1820

This keynote paper examined how the Cato Street Conspiracy linked with rebellions in West Riding, Glasgow and Stirling in 1820. Using new archival material from Kew National Archives I argued that each had to some extent been infiltrated by a government spy system

The Andersonian University, George Birkbeck and the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute

The talk focussed on how innovation and demands for education came from those literally at the cutting edge of society; the turners, millers, fitters and millwrights who created and drove scientific and educational progress through practice, improvement and invention. As L. J. Henderson famously said workers and not theoreticians, were the agents behind Britain’s industrial progress: ‘until 1850 the steam-engine did more for science than science did for the steam-engine’. I argued that there were three main drivers behind the rise of Mechanics’ Institutes and the beginnings of a democratization of education: free lectures being given to workers by the likes of John Anderson, George Birkbeck and Andrew Ure; agitation by workers to set up their own institutes rather than solely relying on benevolent enlightened individuals giving what they could; and finally the ‘tax on knowledge’ that came in with the Six Acts, after Peterloo, at the end of 1819. Each of these drivers created demand for a more theoretical and lucid education than workers could get in apprenticeships where they could create the machinery, but would often not know what it was for or how it would be used. Their work, highly skilled though it was, often lacked meaning beyond its creation. The new institutes also meant that these workers could now gain access to print culture and perhaps even recognition for the innovations they had created in the workshops. Utilising new archival research on the Minute Books for both the Andersonian and the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institutes I argued that the setting up of one institution, the Andersonian, allowed another to emerge within it—the Glasgow Mechanics’ Class. That class split and became a separate body run by the mechanics themselves in 1823, the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute—which then inspired the new London Mechanics’ Institute and became a model throughout the world. I then argued that the established Church, an institution that had nominally been responsible for education, opposed the institutes believing that they were schools for radicals. To some extent, the political content of new engineering magazines that were exempt from the post-Peterloo ‘tax on knowledge’ bears this out as they could provide gateways to violent radical publications like Francis Macerone’s Defensive instructions for the People (1831)

Hazlitt and Peterloo

Article examining Hazlitt and Peterloo

Persuasive bodies: Testimonies of deep brain stimulation and Parkinson's on YouTube

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Contemporary publics actively engage with diverse forms of media when seeking health-related information. The hugely popular digital media platform YouTube has become one means by which people share their experiences of healthcare. In this paper, we examine amateur YouTube videos featuring people receiving Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. DBS has become a widely implemented treatment, and it is surrounded by high expectations that can create difficulty for clinicians, patients and their families. We examine how DBS, Parkinson's disease, and DBS recipients themselves, are delineated within these YouTube videos. The videos, we demonstrate, contain common compositional and stylistic elements that collectively represent DBS as a technological fix, and which accentuate the autonomy of the DBS recipient. The relational, interpersonal dimensions of chronic illness, and the complex impact of DBS on family dynamics, are elided. We therefore shed light on the means by which high expectations regarding DBS are sustained and circulated, and more generally, we illustrate how potentially powerful representations of medical technologies can emerge from the intersection of social media platforms, afflicted bodies and patient narratives