why elastic glass springs matter for Big Ben and the repeal of the corn
laws, and why Charles Dickens rewrote Cinderella as a tax return..
free public lecture at The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House,
London:
'Paying the Tolls: Glass in Time and the Regulation of the Free Trade
State' Jenny Bulstrode (University of Cambridge)
1-2pm, Tuesday 21 August (doors open at 12.30).
Lectures are free and open to the public, but space is limited and
booking is recommended.
For further details and to book please follow the link:
https://www.sal.org.uk/events/2018/08/paying-the-tolls-glass-in-time-and-the-regulation-of-the-free-trade-state/
In the stores of the British Museum are three exquisite springs, made in
the late 1820s and 1830s, to regulate the most precise timepieces in the
world. Barely the thickness of a hair, they are exquisite because they
are made entirely of glass. Combining new archival evidence, funded by
the Antiquarian Horological Society, with the first technical analysis
of the springs, undertaken in collaboration with the British Museum, the
research presented here uncovers the extraordinary significance of these
springs to the global extension of nineteenth century capitalism through
the repeal of the Corn Laws.
In the 1830s and 1840s the Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy; the
Hydrographer to the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort; and the Prime Minister,
Sir Robert Peel, collaborated with the virtuoso chronometer-maker,
Edward John Dent, to mobilize the specificity of particular forms of
glass, the salience of the Glass Tax, and the significance of state
standards, as means to reform. These protagonists looked to glass and
its properties to transform the fiscal military state into an
exquisitely regulated machine with the appearance of automation and the
gloss of the free-trade liberal ideal. Surprising, but significant
connections, linking Newcastle mobs to tales of Cinderella and the use
of small change, demonstrate why historians must attend to materials and
how such attention exposes claims to knowledge, the interests behind
such claims, and the impact they have had upon the design and
architecture of the modern world. Through the pivotal role of glass,
this paper reveals the entangled emergence of state and market
capitalism, how an exquisite glass spring set the time for Dent’s most
famous work, the Westminster clock, Big Ben; and how the British factory
system was transformed in vitreous proportions.
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