Thomas Birch's 'Weekly Letter' (1741-66): correspondence and history in the mid-eighteenth-century Royal Society (original) (raw)
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Thomas Birch (1705–66), Secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765, and Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (1720–90), wrote a ‘Weekly Letter’ from 1741 to 1766, an unpublished correspondence of 680 letters now housed in the British Library (Additional Mss 35396–400). The article examines the dimensions and purposes of this correspondence, an important conduit of information for the influential coterie of the ‘Hardwicke circle’ gathered around Yorke in the Royal Society. It explores the writers' self-conception of the correspondence, which was expressed in deliberately archaic categories of seventeenth-century news exchange, such as the newsletter, aviso and a-la-main. It shows how the letter writers negotiated their difference in status through the discourse of friendship, and concludes that the ‘Weekly Letter’ constituted for the correspondents a form of private knowledge, restricted in circulation to their discrete group, and as such unlike the open and networked model of Enlightenment science.
Making public ahead of print: Meetings and publications at the Royal Society, 1752–1892
Notes and Records: the Royal Society journal of the history of science, 2016
This essay examines the interplay between the meetings and publications of learned scientific societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when journals were an established but not yet dominant form of scholarly communication. The ‘making public’ of research at meetings, long before actual ‘publication’ in society periodicals, enabled a complex of more or less formal sites of communication and discussion ahead of print. Using two case studies from the Royal Society of London—Jan Ingen-Housz in 1782 and John Tyndall in 1857 to 1858—we reveal how different individuals navigated and exploited the power structures, social activities and seasonal rhythms of learned societies, all necessary precursors to gaining admission to the editorial processes of society journals, and trace the shifting significance of meetings in the increasingly competitive and diverse realm of Victorian scientific publishing. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these historical perspectiv...
History of Science, 1999
The precise intellectual status of the Royal Society of London in the mid-eighteenth century continues to be a vexed matter in further need of archival retrieval and historical exploration. Previously, historians have tended to identify a general state of decline in the Society in the decades following the death in 1727 of its most prestigious president, Sir Isaac Newton. There have, however, been two important recent calls for reappraisal by David Miller (1989) and Richard Sorrenson (1996), aptly and deservingly calling this picture into question.' Miller rightly observes that "The Society's eighteenth-century existence has attracted little attention among modem scholars't.? a fact which in itself portrays, and possibly even contributes to, a picture of decline. Sorrenson's admirable revisionary essay has argued that the status of the Society at mid-century must be wholly reassessed and has labelled the idea of a condition or state of decline a "misperception". Sorrenson suggests furthermore that "the Society experienced a period of significant productivity and growth throughout the eighteenth century", devoting itself to "a vibrant instrumental empiricism in general and to the important imperial science of mixed mathematics in particular".' He also highlights the pecuniary importance of non-active Fellows to the Society, claiming that "bereft of any regular state support, [it] could not have carried out its main functions-validating experimental results, facilitating communication and publication, organizing expeditions, and acknowledging exemplary achievement-without the subscription of all its Fellows".' In this paper we aim to continue the important work of these scholars by examining a previously overlooked figure in the history of the Royal Society at mid-century: its president, the natural philosopher and antiquarian Martin Folkes (1690-1754), and to reexamine the infamous attack upon his presidency by John Hill. Folkes's presidency ran from 1741 to 1752, with Hill being the Society's greatest and most persistent eighteenthcentury critic. Hill has, of course, been written upon at some length, but we shall not confine our material on Folkes's presidency to Hill. We shall also bring in here new "voices" raised against Folkes. These include that well-known diarist of the Society'S meetings, Dr William Stukeley, and certain opponents of Folkes's
Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early English Letter Writing Manuals
Rhetorica-a Journal of The History of Rhetoric, 2008
Two of the most noteworthy and successful vernacular rhetoric manuals printed in sixteenth-century England are actually writing manuals, books on how to compose letters: The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) translated by William Fulwood, and The English Secretorie (1586), by Angel Day. Both works reflected and influenced tastes and literacy habits in the book-reading public, and reveal a wider range of cultural engagement than has previously been thought. In particular, three facets can be identified as likely to have stirred reader interest. In their theoretical underpinnings, the books offer vernacular learners a connection with both the humanist and dictaminal epistolary traditions that formed the core of prestige, Latin-based education. In their focus on practical letter exchanges that carry familial and social significance for the middle class, exemplified in a large collection of model letters, the books provide means for English speakers to maintain and possibly advance their social status. And in the model letters themselves, readers would have found texts with proto-fictional elements that could be enjoyed as entertainment, particularly of the amatory type. Understanding the varied appeals of these two books helps us fill out the larger picture relating to how vernacular literacy was valued, developed, and applied.