Donna T. Andrew

Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century

In this study of voluntary charities in eighteenth-century London, Donna Andrew reconsiders the adequacy of humanitarianism as an explanation for the wave of charitable theorizing and experimentation that characterized this period. Focusing on London, the most visible area of both destitution and social experimentation, this book examines the political as well as benevolent motives behind the great expansion of public institutions--nondenominational organizations seeking not only to relieve hardship, but to benefit the nation directly--funded and run by voluntary associations of citizens. The needs of police, the maintaining of civil order and the refining of society, were thought by many ordinary citizens to be central to the expansion of Englands role in the world and to the upholding of the countrys peace at home.Drawing on previously unexplored and unsynthesized materials, this work reveals the interaction between charitable theorizing and practical efforts to improve the condition of the poor. The author argues that it is impossible to comprehend eighteenth-century charity without taking into account its perceived social utility, which altered as circumstances mandated. For example, the charities of the 1740s and 1750s, founded to aid in the strengthening of Englands international supremacy, lost their public support as current opinions of Englands most urgent needs changed. Creating and responding to new visions of what well-directed charities might accomplish, late-century philanthropists tried using charitable institutions to reknit what they believed was a badly damaged social fabric.

Popular culture and public debate: London 1780

This paper examines an important and rather neglected forum for popular discussion – the debating society – in London in 1780. This was the first full year that debating societies left their semi-private, club-like sites and took to new rooms, all across the metropolitan area. These new venues were large (seating between 400 and 1200) commercial settings, where men and women could come to speak and to listen, to enjoy an evening of rational entertainment at a small price. Using the many daily London newspapers as its main source, this essay examines the audiences present at these debates, the types of questions asked and the nature of the responses, when known, and surveys the wide range of reactions to such activity. Finally, it suggests some explanations for and evaluations of the growth and decline of this important cultural form.

‘Adultery à-la-Mode’: Privilege, the Law and Attitudes to Adultery 1770–1809

After a brief examination of the vices which were condemned as the constituent elements in an aristocratic code of licence, this article considers the complex public discussions of the duties of marriage and the relations between marriage, property and aristocratic privilege, and the attacks on adultery that took place in Britain between 1770 and 1809. In order to understand the nature of the public contentions that occurred over this issue, both parliamentary debates and reaction out-of-doors (in pamphlet and newspaper comments and in public debating society meetings as well as in courts of law) will be examined to see how, and with what unanimity, the attack on fashionable adultery took place. For, by the early nineteenth century, the campaign against both upper-class infidelity and its corrosive effects on law and property was systematically and powerfully articulated. Though unsuccessful in passing a parliamentary Act to curb this activity, the work of the campaigners itself heightened public awareness of and focused public antipathy towards the code of gallantry, the sexual equivalent of the code of honour, and the privileged morality of the higher orders.