‘Knowledge is Power’. This Baconian motto marks the founding of the London Mechanics’ Institution in 1823, and the frontispiece of the Mechanic’s Magazine: ‘ours and for us’. This issue of 19 brings together experts of the radical traditions crystallizing in the mechanics’ institution movement of the 1820s with students, staff, emeriti, and alumni of Birkbeck English. We revisit the early history of what has become Birkbeck, University of London and harness our literary approaches to reconstruct traditions and early networks of radical thinking through the figures of John Thelwall and Francis Place, the relationship between physical gatherings and print, the Mechanics’ Magazine and the Westminster Review, tracing the overlaps between periodical writing and Anna Birkbeck’s album, politics and poetics. We identify the place and function of literature as an engine of useful knowledge; a mode of engagement, invention, and speculative thinking that fuels and complements scientific observation and discovery; an emerging domain of the creative imagination operating in the tension between power and knowledge in 1823. To trace the genealogies and cross-disciplinary openings of English as a subject for adult education made up of the traditions of the mechanics’ institution movement, extra-mural studies, and university education, is to identify the disciplinary change that goes with the restructuring of the faculties. We take up discontinuity as a mode of self-reflection, noting the appearance and disappearance of literature as a subject of mechanics’ education in 1823 as a dialectical image for 2023 and beyond, a prompt for critical disciplinarity that urges renewed thinking to reinvent literature’s present and future among the disciplines.

Cover image: Shortshanks [Robert Seymour], The March of Intellect (c. 1828) (detail), hand-coloured etching. British Museum. Wikimedia Commons.

Editors: Luisa Calè (Guest Editor)

Introduction

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Mechanics’ Institution Networks

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From Anna Birkbeck’s Album

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1823–2023

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