‘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
‘Knowledge is Power’: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
Luisa Calè
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
Mechanics’ Institution Networks
‘Operations and cooperations’: John Thelwall, George Birkbeck, and the Movement for Public Education in Britain
Judith Thompson
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
From Magazine to Meeting: Francis Place, the Crown and Anchor Tavern, and the Founding of the London Mechanics’ Institution
Ian Newman
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
Utilitarians, Educators, Poets: The Beginnings of the Westminster Review and the London Mechanics’ Institution
Hilary Fraser
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
Illuminating Knowledge: The London Mechanics’ Institution and the Diorama
John Plunkett
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
In our Time: Adult Education and Birkbeck: Extra-Mural — An Experiment 1988–2009
Laurel Brake
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
In our Time: A Timeline of Adult Education, from the Mechanics’ Movement to Birkbeck
Robyn Jakeman and Laurel Brake
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
From Anna Birkbeck’s Album
Geology, the Imagination, and Speculative Writing: Gideon Mantell’s Fossil Poetry in Anna Birkbeck’s Album
David McAllister
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
L.E.L. in and out of the Birkbeck Album: Poetics and Politics
Isobel Armstrong
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
Lady Caroline Lamb and Miss Elizabeth Spence: Limits of Femininity in Early Nineteenth-Century Salon and Album Culture
Zoe Baron and Beatrice Mossman
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution
‘A flower of an exile’: International Political Networks in Anna Birkbeck’s Album
Emi Del Bene
2024-11-12 Issue 36 • 2024 • 1823–2023: Literature, Invention, Radical Thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution