Visitors at an Exhibition

Dr Ruth Slatter has been a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Hull since January 2018. Ruth is interested in how individuals experienced institutional spaces during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Here she talks about her recent trip to Chicago’s Newberry Library and her research into nineteenth-century international exhibitions.

Historical geographers, historians and design historians have long been interested in international exhibitions. These discussions often beginning in 1851, the year Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert triumphantly opened the Great Exhibition in London. Famous for its glass, greenhouse-like temporary building, which became known as the Crystal Palace, the exhibition displayed industrial, designed and natural products from across the world. During the rest of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries this exhibition set a precedent which was replicated across Europe, America and Australia.

 J. McNeven, The transept from the Grand Entrance, Souvenir of the Great Exhibition 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

Bringing together representatives from each of the represented nations, these exhibitions were – what we would now refer to as – megaevents and played an important role within the colonial politics of the nineteenth-century western world. Like today’s Olympic Games, World Cups, or Cities of Culture designations, these events were an opportunity for cities to be shown off to an international audience; for countries to demonstrate their wealth, cultural capital and political influence; and for competing nations and empires to gain an international reputation for innovative design, beautiful craft, or even rich natural resources.

Sèvres porcelain, displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition as part of the French display 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

Sir George Gilbert Scott, The Hereford Screen, displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

However, these exhibitions also created the opportunity for all members of western societies – from Lords and Ladies to pit men and match stick girls – to see the world in their back yard. Therefore, my research into these events combines traditional discussions about their political purposes, with consideration of how visitors experienced them. My research has largely focused on London’s 1862 International Exhibition – the rather poor and under considered relative of the earlier 1851 Great Exhibition. Working with Helen Creswell, curator and design writer, I have been exploring peoples’ sensory experiences of these events, asking questions about the extent to which visitors engaged with their underlying political purposes and considering them as part of the urban spaces in which they were located.

Edmund Walker, Exterior of the International Exhibition of 1862 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

In November 2018 I was invited to speak at the Newberry Library in Chicago about this research. They had organised an exhibition about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (the American term for an International Exhibition) using their extensive collection of related material and organised a set of related public events. 

In this talk I explored a number of different ways in which we can discuss visitors’ experiences of these events. Considering the designs, the ground plans and the guidebooks made for these events, I spoke about the scale of these buildings, how they were confusing to navigate and therefore left visitors feeling exhausted and bemused. Engaging with commentaries written about these events in contemporary newspapers and magazines, I reflected on the many sounds that would have been heard in these spaces: the clatter of working machines, the tinkle of piano keeps, the chime of porcelain cups in the tea room. With reference to images of these spaces published at the time, I emphasised the importance of thinking about what visitors’ touched while in these spaces, how their bodies were often pressed together during busy periods and how they would also have brushed up against exhibits in often cluttered exhibition spaces. And, positioning these exhibitions within their urban contexts, I discussed how visitors’ experiences of these spaces were not only informed by what they saw, heart or felt in these spaces, but also their experiences of the (generally crowded) public transport and roads they used to arrive and depart from these events, the hotels and hostels they stayed in, and the character of the city in which these exhibitions were located.

My whole public talk is available here: https://soundcloud.com/newberrylibrary/eye-of-the-beholder-visitor-experience-at-19th-century-world-fairs

And you can also listen to a podcast I recorded for the Newberry Library, going into a bit more detail about the 1862 International Exhibition in particular here: https://soundcloud.com/newberrylibrary/the-1862-intl-exhibition-revisited

Five incredible old English homes built by women

by Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh)

The initials ‘ES’ on the parapets are those of Elizabeth Talbot, who built Hardwick Hall. adteasdale, CC BY-SA

We tend to think of the landowners, architects and builders of the past as men, just as we do its politicians, rulers and artists. Women rarely get a look in. But research is uncovering more and more historical examples of women who played a leading role in society, politics or the arts – and the public, it seems, are fascinated. Take Amanda Vickery’s recent series on The Story of Women and Art for example, or the idea that Bach’s wife composed some of his finest works.

Likewise, my ongoing AHRC-funded research project on 'Elite women and the agricultural landscape' is revealing that women owned far more land than was once thought – and this despite the fact that before the late 19th century the law made it difficult for married women to own property of any sort. As a result, we’re also recognising that women played a far greater role in designing, commissioning and building country houses, gardens and parklands than was once imagined.

The nature of surviving historical sources means that women’s contributions are often poorly recorded, but there are exceptions – and we’re uncovering ever more of them. So as the National Trust and English Heritage open their properties to the public for the summer, why not pop along and visit a country house where the influence of a woman in its past is plain to see? Here are a few suggestions to get you going.

 

Temple Newsam

This vast Tudor/Jacobean house stands in grounds near Leeds that were landscaped by Capability Brown. Originally built for Thomas, Lord Darcy (who came to a grizzly end after rebelling against Henry VIII), the house was remodelled in the late 18th century by Frances Ingram, Viscountess Irwin, a highly involved female patron.

Her whopping £60,000 dowry – worth more than £7m in today’s money – had been used to fund improvements to the house and grounds in her husband’s lifetime, but it was only after his death that she was really bitten by the building bug. As a widow, she demolished and rebuilt the entire south wing “for the sole pleasure in building [it] up again” – as she put it – and redecorated much of the rest of the house.

Temple Newsam. theracephotographer, CC BY-SA

 

 

Weston Park

Weston Park is a Palladian-style mansion in Staffordshire largely designed and built by Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham in the 1670s. Weston was her childhood home and while her husband was the legal owner, Wilbraham seems to have retained considerable control of the property during her marriage. We know she was heavily involved in both the design of the new hall and the financial management of the building work, and she’s often hailed as the architect of the house.

 

 

A la Ronde

An unusual 16-sided house near Exmouth, A la Ronde was designed by cousins Jane and Mary Parminter in the 1790s. Somewhat unusually for women at the time, the Parminters had spent nearly a decade travelling in Europe and were apparently inspired by a visit to the octagonal chapel of San Vitale at Ravenna (Italy). The Exmouth property was small and there was no tenanted agricultural land, but the cousins also designed and built a chapel, almshouses and school in the grounds just as much wealthier women did on their estates.

A la Ronde. charliedave, CC BY

Hardwick Hall

Built by Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (better known as Bess of Hardwick) Hardwick Hall is perhaps the most well-known country house in Britain built by a female landowner. Bess was born into a minor gentry family in Derbyshire, but was a woman of great ambition: she married four times, and the property left to her by her four dead husbands eventually made her the richest woman in England.

She oversaw the building of Chatsworth Hall from about 1550 onwards, and later built not one, but two, grand houses at Hardwick. Soon after finishing the Old Hall in 1591, she began to build the adjacent New Hall, a vast house known for its glittering glass façade and unusual floor plan. Visitors should look out for Bess’s initials “ES”, highlighted for posterity in parapets of the towers and elsewhere in the house.

 

 

Belvoir Castle

Elizabeth Manners, fifth duchess of Rutland, was credited by contemporaries both as the driving force behind the rebuilding of Belvoir Castle in the 1820s and the principal manager of the family’s Leicestershire estate. As one friend noted at the duchess’s death in 1825, the duke “did nothing for himself, and his estates, his horses, his family, everything was under her rule”.

While it’s unclear how far this was a fair assessment of the duke’s contribution, the duchess certainly oversaw landscaping works to the castle grounds and took an active interest in the agricultural aspects of the property, including designing a model farm. She also made improvements to Cheveley Park (Suffolk) in the early 1800s, oversaw the building works at York House on the Mall for her lover the Duke of York and drew up designs for a new palace for George IV.

The list of such houses is growing. So, while undoubtedly disadvantaged both by the law and by societal expectations of their gender, the wives, widows and single women of the past could – and did – build grand country houses. Not all female landowners had access to the money and resources necessary to re-build or significantly extend their country residence of course, but others re-planned gardens and parklands or improved the large agricultural estates which lay beyond the park boundaries. In doing so, these women and others like them had a far greater impact on the landscapes of early modern and Georgian England than history has so far acknowledged.

Briony McDonagh is Lecturer in Human Geography at University of Hull.

An earlier version of this article was published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Summer 'fieldwork', archives and hidden histories

By Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh)

Following on from Michelle’s recent post on her fieldwork in Malta, several of us have decided to blog about what we’re up to over the summer break from teaching, specifically our summer research and/or fieldwork. As a historical geographer and landscape historian, much of the fieldwork I’m engaged in is rather different in nature to that undertaken by my physical geography colleagues. It doesn't involve flooded rivers or exploding volcanoes, dark caves or slippery climbs up glaciers. It doesn't require a great deal in the way of equipment and doesn't involve long and detailed risk assessments (for which I count myself extremely lucky). Instead it all takes place in the UK, a good deal of it within two or three hours’ drive of my office here at Hull. Much of what I do relies on a combination of landscape history fieldwork, maps, aerial photographs and documentary records. For me, fieldwork often consists of carefully scrutinizing – and sometimes photographing, measuring, and generally poking around – the landscape for traces of the past in the present. Hedges, field patterns, green lanes, boundary stones, and old buildings can all tell us a great deal about the way past landscapes were organised, resources utilized and space experienced by those who lived and worked there (for more on this kind of approach to the landscape, readers might like to check out WG Hoskins’ classic The Making of the English Landscape).

Hoskins' classic The Making of the English Landscape (paperback edition)

Yet this summer my ‘fieldwork’ hasn’t for the most part taken place in the field at all. Along with some odds and ends of fieldwork for other projects (for example, on the Diggers – on which more another time), I’m spending the summer chasing up loose ends for the book I’m writing on aristocratic and gentle women’s contribution to estate management and improvement in the long eighteenth century. This project has involved some work in the field proper – for example, visiting country houses owned by women, tracking down their grave inscriptions and identifying building work designed or paid for by them – but also a great deal of archival work. I’ve been to county record offices and private collections all over the country looking for evidence of women’s contribution to estate management and improvement, making use of collections from places as far apart as Cornwall and County Durham. So, like my physical geography colleagues, I’ve certainly clocked up the miles on this project if only within the UK. Moreover, we can think of archive work as a kind of field experience (on which see Lorimer, 2010 and Keighren, 2013). For historical geographers and others, local and national archival repositories provide spaces for collecting data and testing theories, sites where outcomes are often unknown and unpredictable, and where one may have to dig through endless boxes or volumes before alighting on something fantastic or finding just what you hoped might be there. And while they may be neither muddy nor dangerous, public search rooms and archive back offices are frequently cold and uncomfortable places and the documents surprisingly filthy.

My latest foray has been to Surrey History Centre, a new-build (and warm) archival repository on the outskirts of Woking. In my book I’m writing a bit about a woman called Jane More Molyneux, who inherited the Loseley Park estate near Guildford after the deaths of her brother and sister in 1776 and 1777, respectively. Like many of the propertied women who feature in my book, Molyneux was a dedicated estate manager and committed bookkeeper. I spent a day reading the volumes of estate accounts and records kept by Molyneux as she tried to repay the debts run up by her spendthrift brother and save the estate from financial ruin. The house was in a terrible condition: the account books contained endless payments for ‘pans to catch the drips’ and the steward was instructed to look over the exterior of the house every day in order to check that there was no stonework likely to fall and injure someone! In the winter, snow had to be shovelled out of the attics so bad were the holes in the roof. Plus the whole place seems to have been overrun with vermin.

Yet Molyneux took on her task with great resolve, renting out the agricultural estate in an attempt to raise cash to repair the house, selling off outlying parts of the estate and economizing on her housekeeping costs wherever she could. Ultimately her efforts paid off and by the early 1790s both the house and the estate finances were in a much improved position. Molyneux then made the somewhat unusual decision to lease out what was left of the land in hand including the house and gardens and move to London. Though she spent the rest of her life in the capital, Molyneux had already done much to secure the financial well-being of future generations of her family. Amongst the numerous volumes of accounts, notes and memoranda she handed on to her heir – the illegitimate son of her profligate brother – was a book recording the repairs she had undertaken on the house and estate in the 15 years she lived on the estate. This she had inscribed as ‘for my own perusal and satisfaction’, a note which reminds us of the personal sense of achievement and pride that women might take in bookkeeping, and indeed in estate management more generally – a theme which my book explores in greater detail.

One of Molyneux's account books (above) and detail from it (below).

Original at the Surrey History Centre. Photo B. McDonagh.

So all in, this was a good day’s work in Woking. I wasn't plagued by any of the difficulties which sometimes beset archive work – documents ‘not fit for production’, missing items or indecipherable handwriting – and unlike many Georgian women, Jane More Molyneux left a substantial collection of material which can be used to reconstruct the details of her life and estate management. More than once I’ve spent fruitless days struggling to find the materials needed to unlock the ‘hidden histories’ of particular female landowners, but here at Surrey my ‘fieldwork’ was a success. I’m now working on writing up Molyneux’s role in estate management for the book, and thinking about how her experience relates to that of other propertied women in Georgian England. But to find out the answer to that, you’ll need to keep an eye out for later blog posts on the project here and elsewhere. Or perhaps even buy the book!

Further reading:

W. G. Hoskins (1955) The Making of the English Landscape (Hodder and Stoughton).

Innes M. Keighren (2013) Teaching historical geography in the field, Journal of Geography in Higher Education 37.4, 567-77.

Hayden Lorimer (2010) Caught in the nick of time: archives and fieldwork, in Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang and Linda McDowell, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography (Sage), 248-73.

How I became a historical geographer

By Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh) 

Hi all! This is the latest blog in our series about how we came to do what we do. My name's Briony and I'm a lecturer in human geography here at GEES in Hull. My research interests lie in historical and cultural geography, and I’m particularly interested in how issues of power, space, identity and gender have been played out in the British landscape over the last 1000 years.

Like many of my colleagues I certainly didn't know I wanted to be an academic as a child, but I did like old and ruined buildings, Time Team and trying to figure out why the landscape looked like it did. My friends and I spent considerable amounts of time exploring an abandoned group of farm buildings not far from school (below), which it later turned out were 16th century in date and built from the ruins of a medieval monastery. For some reason I've long ago forgotten, I chose not to take History at GCSE, but ended up taking  a combination of A-level subjects which included both Geography and Classics. I applied for degree courses in a range of subjects but finally settled on a BA hons in Geography at University of Nottingham with the intention of applying for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when I left.

Haltemprice Priory Farm © Mr Gareth Parry LRPS

From: http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=164688&mode=adv

That didn't happen, of course, principally because I got bitten by the research bug. I took second year courses which included classes on ancient woodlands, urban histories and the mappa mundi and third year modules which involved fieldwork on Italian environmental histories and the urban plan of Revolutionary Paris, along with archival work in the University of Nottingham's Manuscripts and Special Collections. I was hooked. I chose to stay at Nottingham to complete a Masters in Landscape and Culture – which included training in standing buildings and landscape archaeology – followed by 3 years writing a PhD on the historical geographies of the Yorkshire Wolds before c. 1600. It was during this time I developed my current interdisciplinary approach to the landscape combining documentary research, maps, landscape archaeology and theoretical perspectives drawn from cultural geography and elsewhere.

The day I submitted by PhD I was offered a job with the Victoria County History contributing to a volume on the history of Howden and the surrounding region. I did this for 7 months before securing a longer-term post-doctoral position working on an AHRC-funded project researching the long-term impacts of parliamentary enclosure on the landscapes and communities of Northamptonshire (you can find out more about the project here). As part of my post, I also taught in the History department at the University of Hertfordshire, teaching a second year social history course and a third year module on the history of the English landscape, something I absolutely loved doing. Whilst working through endless boxes of archival materials at the Northamptonshire Record Office I came across Elizabeth Prowse, a committed agricultural improver who radically remodelled her estate during her 43-year widowhood (for more on Prowse, see my chapter on her here). It was as a result of researching and writing about Prowse that I began to wonder about the contribution made by other elite women to managing and improving landed estates in Georgian England. We know many male landowners pushed forward enclosure and introduced agricultural improvements on their estates, but we know almost nothing about the part female landowners played in the changes which transformed the English landscape in the century after about 1730. Women certainly owned property as widows and heiresses and sometimes even wives, but how involved were they in its management and improvement?

Wicken House (Northamptonshire), the home of Elizabeth Prowse

These are the questions that my current research project sets out to answer. Whilst still working as a post-doc in 2009, I secured a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for the project which I then undertook at the University of Nottingham between 2010 and 2014 (the end date for the project was twice extended as a result of the arrival of two little people in my life). Running my own project was a great experience and I later managed to secure additional funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to write a book from the project. I transferred this grant to the University of Hull when I took up my post here in early 2014, and I’m now about halfway through writing up the book (to be published by Ashgate, hopefully in 2015).

So after almost 7 years of post-doctoral and fixed term posts, I finally have a permanent job. I have to admit that when I was completing my PhD, I never imagined I would spend quite so many years in post-doctoral positions. But those 7 years have given me the real luxury of being able to conduct a huge amount of research on a wide range of topics. In addition to my book on elite women, I'm currently working on projects on late medieval popular geographical imaginations, early modern anti-enclosure protest (see, for example, https://hull.academia.edu/BrionyMcDonagh) and the land rights movement in the 21st century (you can listen to me talk about the latter project here). I'm hoping having got all this research under my belt will stand me in good stead in my new job given all the demands on my time that a larger teaching role and increased departmental administration are likely to bring. All in, I’ve certainly got plenty to keep me busy for the next 7 years!