Dr Matthew Craske

This article explores the role that contemporary religion and poltics played in he subject matter of Mary Linwood's needlework paintings.  Linwood was one of Britian's pioneering needlewomen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her appraoch to depciting famous narrative paintigs in stitch has been laregly overlooked by historians of art. The article is underpinned by the use of primary source material, and dreaws on the most recent scholarshipo in the field of textile history, notably the work of Heidi Strobel and Rosinka Desnoyers. Mary Linood was an evangelical and a woman interested in the poltics of the period. Her use of needleork was a means  of both the expression of her piety and of represnenting her poltical views - espeically toward the brutality of the Napoleoic wars. This article also indicates that Linwood's views and medium wer of remarkable interest to the wider public during the period.   

This article concerns Edmund's Burke's role in the creation of funerary monuments. The aim has been to analyse Burke's vision of his place in national history through this vehicle. It is because monuments were directed at communicating with posterity that they form an excellent means of gauging where their commissioners felt they stood in the grand sweep of national history. Burke, I argue, revealed much about his vision of how Britain ought to develop through his involvement in making funerary monuments. More specifically, the article concerns Burke's belief that some of his friends were agents of providence, whose higher purpose was to enact God's will that Britain should become a prime imperial power. He imagined that the monuments he helped to create would endure in order to vindicate his sense that his circle were at once blessed and a blessing to the nation. The text traces Burke's involvement in commissioning important tombs, and writing inscriptions, form the early 1780s to his death in 1797. One function is to set in context the story of his involvement in the commemoration of David Garrick in the period between 1793 and 1797. The article contains a description of the part taken by Burke in the conspicuous commemoration of the so called Literary Club, of which Garrick was a member. It sets out to show how Burke regarded this circle of men as a 'providential elite'.

This article concerns the generation of anti-competitive practices, and the associated discontents, that rose to the fore in the London sculpture trade in the late eighteenth century (1770-1799). It charts the business strategies and technical procedures of the most economically successful practitioners, whose workshops had some of the characteristics of manufactories, and whose critics accused them of conducting a "monopoly" trade. Small-scale practitioners lost out in the competition for great public contracts on account of their design processes and their inability to represent any manifestation of "establishment". A combination of three factors increased the gap between a handful of powerful "manufacturers" and the rest of the trade: the foundation of the Royal Academy, shifts in the ways designs were evaluated, and a growing number of very lucrative contracts for public sculpture. I conclude that such were the discontents within the London trade that by the 1790s, there was a marked tendency for practitioners who were not manufacturers to be attracted to democratic political movements, to the Wilkite call for liberty and the rise of civic radicalism in the merchant population of London.

This essay is an account of the attempt to erect a massive allegorical monument to George III in central London. This was intended to represent the King as a Grecian charioteer, leading four spirited stallions over a prone hydra, symbolic of Faction. Those who devised this imagery clearly set out to create a conspicuous expression of their trenchant opposition to political reform. The essay centres upon a description of how plans for such a monument were frustrated by the inability of the subscription committee to raise funds. It reveals how the political ambition to provide an emblem of the crushing of public disorder dissolved in the face of public apathy and opposition. The project was finally realised through the erection of an equestrian monument to the King on Cockspur Street. The story of this monument is set within a broader account of Georgian urban planning. The, largely forgotten, plans of a political set, based at Belvoir Castle in Rutlandshire, to reshape London are reviewed. This clique did not just propose the monument to George III, they presented their contemporaries with elaborate plans to rebuild the Capital. The politics of the Belvoir set were Tory and one of the aims of this essay is to urge a reconsideration of the assumption, based on Everett’s The Tory View of Landscape, that persons of this political persuasion were not concerned with landscape improvements. Indeed, the aim is to show that Tories, of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a great interest in metropolitan improvements. This essay shows that some Tories were preoccupied with changing the urban landscape, employing ‘improvements’ to establish more clearly in the public mind the virtues of traditional social order. This order was to proceed from the authority of the crown.