I started 2013 with an academic bang attending the annual conference of the
British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies for three days last week. The theme was '
Credit, Money and the Market' which attendees used to discuss a wide range of subjects relating to financial and intellectual concerns in the period.
I took the opportunity to create a panel with friends who work in medical and literary history in which we looked at how credit and credibility were created and assessed through ephemera in our relative areas. I considered Hogarth's image of the longitude lunatic in
A Rake's Progress (predictably) in the context of the print and text ephemera that discussed the longitude problem as a ridiculous or malicious scientific project, and/or as the route to and result of madness. I used this to think about how our man
John Harrison had such trouble establishing his own credibility and getting the Board of Longitude to give credit to his ideas.
It was a rich and stimulating conference. I heard about cultural knowledge production in botanical and zoological texts, and satirical attitudes to burning mirrors. I discovered what eighteenth-century gentlemen carried in their pockets, how the poet Kit Smart was patronised by the
Delaval family, and how late seventeenth-century theatre began creating a language of political sensibility. I saw caricatures of the 1797 invasion crisis, a fascinating Goya painting of
The Junta of the Philippines, and contemporary video art inspired by eighteenth-century financial crisis.
But what really struck me, like many, was Robert Hume's thought-provoking keynote on 'The Value of Money' in which he argued convincingly that we need to take better account of the cost of cultural products and activities in our period. Money comparisons across time are notoriously problematic, but Hume made a good case for multiplying eighteenth-century prices by two or three hundred for present day comparison. This gave me pause. Many of the pamphlets that proposed longitude schemes, on which my PhD is based, don't include the price on their title page, but of those that do the cheapest seem to have cost 6d. This sounds nice and cheap, but on Hume's scale equates to at least £12 today. I baulk at paying £6 or £7 for a paperback let alone a slim pamphlet on a niche and heavily satirised subject. I am no longer surprised that such pamphlets crop up in so few libraries, I am frankly surprised that any one bought them at all!