Interpreting Local Voices

Chair: Lori Lee Oates

""..in want of food and almost naked for want of clothes..": the Voices and Identity of the Poor Cloth Workers of Early Modern Exeter.” by Tamsin Bailey

Very little research has touched on 'identity' in early modern Exeter, nor has previous research focused  specifically on the poor involved in the woollen cloth industry.  Historians have suggested the broad outline of social structure in the early modern city, have investigated the institutional structure of the Tucker’s Hall guild of cloth workers, and most recently have researched the 16th century system of poor relief in the city, but none have been concerned with charting individual or group experiences of identity.

I am interested in what prosopographical studies might tell us about social structure in Exeter and in particular about those inhabitants involved in the City's woollen cloth industry.  This paper will consider the poor cloth workers of Exeter in the late seventeenth century and their relationship with those who provided for them in the form of public relief or private philanthropy.   Sources from the Exeter City and Tuckers Hall archive are examined for what they may reveal about the poor cloth workers: their self perception as well as how and why they presented their identity to the authorities who shaped their lives.  Insights may be gained from comparing this with the representations of the poor by those who governed them.

“Commercial Sustainability in Uncertain Times: Financial Strategy in Cornwall, 1771-1905” by John Dirring

Institutional sustainability amid the uncertainties of volatile global financial markets is a contemporary issue confronting large banking corporations and small credit unions alike. It also confronted early banking in Cornwall, amid the opportunities and uncertainties of the Industrial Revolution and the turmoil of war.

With few barriers to entry, origins of Cornish banks were varied; not all were sustainable beyond the immediate circumstances of their formation. Sustainability in this historical context is approached through a consideration of the situations of individual bankers and their qualitative, pragmatic decision-making. Whatever their motivations and objectives, their necessary preoccupation was with liquidity in the face of unlimited liability. How bankers in Cornwall managed the balance between risk and liquidity is shown by considering the ways in which some of them failed. The slow development of regular, sustainable operating procedures led to the emergence of a particular ethos and mentality of banking in Cornwall. The evolution of professional, universal standards of practice eventually imposed financial objectivity and engendered risk avoidance.

Legislation after 1879 fully facilitated corporate limited liability. Subsequent expansion and amalgamations absorbed the main Cornish players by 1905, ultimately creating the large corporate institutions familiar in the twentieth century and after.

“Thomas Hardy’s Provincialism: Overcoming Aesthetic Authority With a ‘Fresh and Original Vein’” by Jonathan Memel

In the spring of 1876 Thomas Hardy found himself in a moment of artistic crisis. After writing to his mentor Leslie Stephen for advice, the surprising response suggested that Hardy believe in his own aesthetic taste rather than defer to the authority of others. The Return of the Native, published in 1878 was Hardy’s subsequent novel, and its first chapter was both an unprecedented evocation of place, and an opposition to received standards of beauty. This was a period, I argue, in which Hardy awakened to the regional, idiosyncratic aesthetic for which he was to become known.

Learning to see the world in his own way, then, was crucial to Hardy’s career. But this shift away from a ‘beauty of the accepted kind’ , towards a more personal taste held wider resonance. Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were those among a literary elite advocating culture as a solution to social turmoil, yet there was lively disagreement as to what such culture should be. Were the classical tastes of the highly educated those best placed to unify society?  Or would more localized standards of beauty better suit the needs of a nation of individuals?