PREFACE 1. for an Analysis of Machine Metaphors and the Impact of Technology in Imperial Settings See Michael P. Adas, Machines
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Notes PREFACE 1. For an analysis of machine metaphors and the impact of technology in imperial settings see Michael P. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man (Ithaca, NY, 1990). See also Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (New York, 1990). 2. Les Jeux Olympiques, 776 av. J.C.-1896 (Paris, 1896) 108. 3. Ideal Health and How to Obtain It by Physical Culture, by 'M.D/ (Lon don, 1909) 1. 4. The problems with studying the body in the context of private life in this period have already been cogently laid out by Michelle Perrot (ed.), A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Cambridge, MA, 1990) 1-5. Even most sociologists, who are typically less tradition bound than historians, would admit that there is as yet no sociology of the body, only a diffuse and cautious effort to begin collecting bodily related data. As Anthony Synnott argues in The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (New York, 1993), psy chologists and philosophers as well as historians have tended to ignore the body. Groundbreaking work by historians of gender and sexuality such as Judith Walkowitz, Peter Brown and Thomas Laqeuer are notable exceptions in this regard. 5. See David Landes, Prometheus Unbound: Technological Change and Indus trial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969) 357. 6. Ibid. 7. Like the geographical nation, biological categories such as gender often implicitly finesse questions about their specificity and substance. These are taken for granted as the visible which denotes the under lying truth of differences. 8. Despite Britain's position as the centre of English language health and fitness publishing, the US has received greater attention in terms of the refashioning of Victorian manliness into a more consumer- oriented gender ideology. This is due in part to an understandable tendency to view the US as a dominant political and cultural force. Accordingly its successes are related to a gendered paradigm asso ciating all power with maleness. As a working category, masculinity begins to escape our analytical grasp once it becomes overly 'national ized', or too much identified with a specific state/cultural hegemony. On American exceptionality, see Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, 1987). 9. Other significant events in 1829 included the founding of the central ized London Metropolitan Police by Sir Robert Peel. Moving bodies about became easier too. Franz Ressel invented the screw propeller 130 Notes 131 for steamships in 1829. Besides the opening of the first Liverpool- Manchester railway, 26 steam cars were operating in London by 1830. In anticipation of later mass health crazes, American clergy man Sylvester W. Graham linked fat, meat and white bread to poor health and the stimulation of carnal appetites in 1829. In the same year, his fellow Massachusettsan, physician Jacob Bigelow, coined the word 'technology'. 10. For an explanation of the graphic revolution and another view of this era that includes the present, see Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage, 1992). 11. Synnott, 262-3. 12. For more on this concept and a somewhat dated but interesting take on sociopathology and technocracy see Lewis Yablonsky, Robopaths: People as Machines (Baltimore, MD, 1972). See also Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York, 1988). INTRODUCTION 1. From a letter concerning Watt's new invention for copying sculp ture, 11 May 1811. See also the 'Machine for Copying Sculpture' (1811) in H. W. Dickinson, The Garret Workshop of fames Watt (Lon don, 1929), and reference to a 'sculpture-machine' in Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton and Watt (London, 1865), as quoted in Humphrey Jennings, Pandemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contem porary Observers, 1660-1886 (London, 1985) 130 and 303-5. 2. See Mollie Sands, The Eighteenth-Century Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone, 1737-1777 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987) 15. Novelty acts or simple displays like that of a 'giant and a dwarf could be seen at Marylebone as well. Ibid., 65. 3. The German-born Zoffany's combination of neo-classical poses with contemporary subject matter was seen in his portrayal of William Hunter giving an anatomy lesson at the Royal Academy (c. 1772) and in the classically modelled Death of Captain Cook (c. 1789-97). Benjamin West, the first American painter to study in Italy, shocked London's Royal Academy with his similar neo-classical depiction, Death of Wolfe (1770). The shock was not a response to the fact that West had used classical postures and gestures but that he had painted Wolfe, a commoner, and that the figures were depicted in contempor ary dress. 4. Apart from The Gladiator, his other works included such images of eighteenth-century science as Experiment with an Air Pump (1768) and The Orrery (1766). 5. See the discussion of the simile of the sculptor in Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (London, 1929) 264-8. 6. See Veronica Kelley and Dorothera E. Von Mucke, Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA, 1994). 7. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens. 132 Notes 8. At the end of the eighteenth century the personal caricature was in its infancy as a media tool and images of public figures seldom looked like the people they were meant to depict. See Kenneth O. Morgan (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (Oxford, 1984) 367-9. 9. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (Lon don, 1969) 96. Watt to Robert Milne, engineer of the New River Water company in the 1790s, Boulton and Watt Papers. 10. Apart from the concern with prettifying his own body, George IV showed a Rabelaisian interest in bodily matters of size as well. He was said to have measured a Mrs Vaneck's behind with a hand kerchief and showed the measurement to 'most of the company', from G. W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1898). In a quote from a contemporary 'unpublished diary' he was also said to have relished telling a story about the very large penis of one of his brother's, from A Persian at the Court of King George 1809-1810, trans, and ed. Margaret Clarke (1988). He was not so happy when others alluded to his own growing girth, as in the apocryphal story of Brummell referring to him as another's 'fat friend' or when the poet Leigh Hunt was jailed for two years for calling the recently appointed Prince Regent 'a fat Adonis at fifty'. All anecdotes from Elizabeth Longford (ed.), The Oxford Royal Book of Anecdotes (Oxford, 1991). 11. See Perrot, A History of Private Life, 47-50, 87-9. Middle-class crit icism of upper-class 'indolence, their corruption, their immorality was at its height in the 1820s and 1830s; it subsided as the aristocracy and gentry became more attached to domestic values'. Ibid., 89. 12. The fighter's arm is now on display at a pub in County Kildare. In his 1887 tour, John L. Sullivan made a point of visiting the site in Kildare where Donnelly beat Cooper. See Patrick Myler, Dan Donnelly, his Life and Legends (London, 1976); Allen Abel, 'Dan Donnelly', Sports Illustrated, 82 (7) (1995): 164-73; and Michael Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and his America (Urbana, IL, 1988) 245. 13. Prizefighting can be viewed as the most immediate non-military cross- class antecedent of late-nineteenth-century male body culture. Need less to say, the various roles of fighters, touts, trainers, patrons and gamblers continued to be allotted by virtue of one's economic class. It is important to note that it was largely a spectator phenomena rather than a participatory one. Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art (Cornell, NY, 1986) 30. 14. Carlyle was none the less a great one for employing the metaphor of the hand-to-hand fight, see Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT, 1957) 206. 15. Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1978) 3-4. 16. Suffering through years of blindness and debilitating prophyria, the King's illness required Parliament's official enactment of a regency (1811-20). 17. J. P. M. Pannell, Man the Builder: An Illustrated History of Engineering (New York, 1964) 100-1. Alongside Huskisson, the trains carried over 700 other dignitaries including the Duke of Wellington. Notes 133 18. Huskisson was a former MP and recent President of the Board of Trade. From the Mechanics Magazine, 25 September 1830, as quoted in Jennings, Pandemonium, 177-8. Apparently, Huskisson had been crossing the tracks in order to take the extended hand of the Duke. Other guests such as Prince Esterhazy were only narrowly pulled to safety at the last second. Ibid., 178. 19. From Fanny Kemble, The Records of a Girlhood (1878). Ibid., 179. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Richard Aldington, Four English Portraits, 1801-1851 (London, 1948) 50. 23. Roger Boutet de Monvel, Beau Brummell and his Times (London, 1908) 196. 24. Longford, Anecdotes. Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, II. During the King's lying-in-state on 6 July 1830. 25. His work on 'clothes' is found in Sartor Resartus, which was begun in 1829. The chapter entitled the 'Dandiacal Body' has been described as serving as 'the Victorian epitaph for Regency Dandyism'. It was published in book form in the US in 1836 and in England in 1838. See Ellen Moers, The Dandy, from Brummell to Beerbohm (Nebraska, 1960) 178. 26. Balzac was perhaps the first writer to take clothes seriously as a modern sociological study, as noted in Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (New York, 1980) 433.