Jonathan Conlin

Vauxhall revisited: the afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden, 1770-1859

I 1859 the news that Royal Vauxhall Gardens was to be sold to developers came as a shock. Since the late seventeenth century this twelve-acre suburban garden on the south bank of the Thames had been providing Londoners with a place to promenade, dine, and enjoy music on summer evenings. Journalist Laman Blanchard compared the prospect of a last night at Vauxhall with the sale of the pyramids or the last fall of water over Niagara. His surprise is striking, as the property had changed hands repeatedly during the previous twenty years, with several series of “last nights” being held. When the tickets for the 1859 last night were printed the organizers were at pains to make it clear that this was to be, “positively,” the very last night “for ever.” By the midnineteenth century, the Gardens largely served to remind observers of its heyday as a gilded, polite Georgian paradise haunted by the great and the good—a heyday that many identified with their own youth. For such people, the decay and closure of the Gardens represented the loss of innocence, or, perhaps more accurately, the loss of a willed suspension of disbelief in the illusions that underpinned the pleasure garden’s success. As the Daily Director and Entr’acte put it in 1860, “Reader, if you are not on the shady side of forty, you know nothing of Vauxhall.” The same statement, without the age restriction, might almost be said of historians of eighteenthand nineteenth-century British culture. Pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall are regularly cited as typifying a nascent public sphere, one identified with the commodification of culture and the rise of the “middling rank.” In John Brewer’s masterful survey of English culture in the eighteenth century, The Pleasures of the Imagination, pleasure gardens join West End theaters, art exhibitions, and concert halls as “part of an established itinerary of cultural plea-

Vauxhall on the boulevard: pleasure gardens in London and Paris, 1764–1784

Open to both aristocracy and middling rank, pleasure gardens fashioned a spectacle of order out of a heterogeneous crowd. They have been seen as uniquely British spaces, demonstrating how Britain juggled commerce, politeness and liberty. Yet these resorts had imitators abroad, especially in Paris. Far from being a case of Paris emulating London, they created a playful fantasy that shuttled visitors between the two cities – helping them imagine the ideal metropolis, polite yet policed.

Gladstone and Christian Art, 1832–1854

Although his activity as a private collector has been documented, the extent to which William Ewart Gladstones interest in art was implicated in his thought on church and state has been overlooked. Previously unnoticed memoranda and correspondence of the 1830s and 1840s with the French art historian and Roman Catholic thinker, Francois Rio, demonstrate a fascination with religious painting of early Renaissance Italy, of the sort which only came to be appreciated in Britain many years later. For Rio, however, introducing Gladstone to ‘Christian art’ was as much about encouraging Gladstone in his hopes of reuniting the Protestant and Catholic churches as it was about reforming his taste. The manuscripts considered here show Gladstone to have viewed art history in terms of a struggle between sanctity and sensuality, visualized in terms both of the individual as well as of nationalities. In so far as the young Conservative politician formulated this history in tandem with his theory of the religious personality of the state, a study of his model of Christian arts development affords a new path into an old debate: did Gladstone betray the principles of his first book, The state in its relations with the church (1838) in his subsequent political evolution into Liberal statesman?

High art and low politics: a new perspective on John Wilkes

In 1777, towards the end of his colourful career as a radical politician, John Wilkes (1725-1797) became the first politician to advocate the creation of a national gallery in Britain. More familiar for his opposition periodical The North Briton and the riotous Middlesex Campaign of 1768, Wilkes’s beliefs on the limits of royal authority with respect to parliament and the people were also expressed in his lifelong activities in support of the ‘polite arts’ in Britain. Building on his friendships with Denis Diderot and J.J. Winckelmann, as well as his links to London’s mercantile class, he challenged contemporaries who saw Britain’s commercial prowess as irreconcilable with such moral improvements. When juxtaposed to his attempts at parliamentary reform, his demonstration of liberty’s importance for the arts raised the prospect of greater public access to culture, as well as to the franchise.

The acute mania of King George III: A computational linguistic analysis

We used a computational linguistic approach, exploiting machine learning techniques, to examine the letters written by King George III during mentally healthy and apparently mentally ill periods of his life. The aims of the study were: first, to establish the existence of alterations in the King’s written language at the onset of his first manic episode; and secondly to identify salient sources of variation contributing to the changes. Effects on language were sought in two control conditions (politically stressful vs. politically tranquil periods and seasonal variation). We found clear differences in the letter corpus, across a range of different features, in association with the onset of mental derangement, which were driven by a combination of linguistic and information theory features that appeared to be specific to the contrast between acute mania and mental stability. The paucity of existing data relevant to changes in written language in the presence of acute mania suggests that lexical, syntactic and stylometric descriptions of written discourse produced by a cohort of patients with a diagnosis of acute mania will be necessary to support the diagnosis independently and to look for other periods of mental illness of the course of the King’s life, and in other historically significant figures with similarly large archives of handwritten documents.

HISTORY AS FORM: ARCHITECTURE AND LIBERAL ANGLICAN THOUGHT IN THE WRITINGS OF E. A. FREEMAN *

Traditionally viewed as one of the leading lights of Whig history in the High Victorian period, Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) is best known for his History of the Norman Conquest (1865–1876). For all his reputation for scholarly pedantry, Freeman had wide-ranging interests, including architecture. His first book, A History of Architecture (1849), was both unique and controversial: unique in being the first history of world architecture in English, and controversial because its “philosophical” method differed so markedly from the two most common understandings of architecture in his own time (antiquarianism and ecclesiology). A closer look at Freemans intellectual pedigree reveals links through Thomas Arnold to German idealist models of universal history. These links lead Freeman to open up a wider perspective on history by developing an understanding of the past based on an analysis of material culture. Architecture offered a window onto the “hidden law” by which human culture evolved. To study Freemans historical writing on architecture is to gain a new insight into the development of the Liberal Anglican mind and its concern for a divinely ordained pattern in world history.

The amiras and the Ottoman Empire, 1880-1923: the case of the Gulbenkians

The contribution of the amira or merchant elites of the Ottoman Empire to the empire’s development was highly contested in the decades around 1900. Ottoman Armenian amiras dominated imperial finance and international trade, as well as coordinating the introduction of new crops and industrial technologies. Integrating the Empire in a globalized world, however, led to accusations by non-Armenians that the amiras were guilty of condemning that same Empire to a subservient state of clientage, while fellow Ottoman Armenians increasingly viewed the amiras as unpatriotic collaborators. Drawing on a wealth of new archival material from one leading amira clan, this article attempts to move beyond nationalist narratives, revealing the amiras’ multiple identities as the vanguard of a globalizing world.

‘Renowned and unknown’Calouste Gulbenkian as collector of paintings

Combining Impressionist, Barbizon and Dutch seventeenth-century masterpieces with eighteenth-century French and English portraits and Venetian veduti, the collection of paintings formed by the Anglo-Armenian financier and oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian (1869–1955) and now housed in the Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon closely resembles collections formed by contemporaries such as Henry Frick and Jacques Doucet. The manner of its acquisition, however – most notably purchases from Russia’s Hermitage Museum –displayed a ‘buccaneer’ element. New research shows how Gulbenkian leveraged his oil interests as well as promises of a bequest to influence the leading British, French and American agents, dealers and curators of the twentieth century.

Debt, diplomacy and dreadnoughts: the National Bank of Turkey, 1909–1919

ABSTRACT The National Bank of Turkey (NBT) (1909) was an attempt by the new Young Turk regime to assert economic sovereignty: creating a multinational bank able to provide financing free of the diplomatic conditions previously attached to loans by French banks. NBTs role financing naval rearmament and oil development has attracted a good deal of attention from historians. Using the archives of the banks founders and Ottoman ministers alongside familiar diplomatic sources, this article is the first to combine Ottoman and European perspectives on NBT, challenging the traditional narrative which presents the Ottoman Empire as the helpless ‘victim’ of the fiscal imperialism of France, Britain and Germany in the years before 1914.

‘An irresponsible flow of images’: Berger, Clark, and the Art of Television, 1958–1988

John Berger and Mike Dibb’s four-part 1972 BBC2 series Ways of Seeing is a landmark in British arts broadcasting: an polemical essay in deconstruction intended to clear the ground on which a truly ‘public’ art and criticism would subsequently be built. Although its format and style were very different, it was widely interpreted as a Marxist riposte to an equally renowned series, Kenneth Clarks Civilisation (1969). This essay considers this creative dialogue between Berger and Clark, reconstructing a personal as well as intellectual relationship. At first glance the pair seem opposites, with Clark at the centre of the postwar cultural Establishment and Berger on the fringes. Along with such questions of patronage this essay considers the ways in which Berger and Clark understood landscape, the nude and television itself. It argues that Berger’s puritanism and particularism may have prevented the series from achieving Berger’s ultimate goal: a more participatory public for the arts. If this was a failure, however, responsibility lies largely with admirers’ misinterpretation of the series. They made Berger’s means into an end in itself