Kneale describes the problem of defining and measuring moderate drinking in Britain between 1800 ... more Kneale describes the problem of defining and measuring moderate drinking in Britain between 1800 and 1939, drawing on material from arguments made within temperance, medical and (more unusually) life assurance circles. Debating abstinence, moderation and excessive drinking, these authorities engaged with writers and scientists in North America and Europe to establish just how much drink was enough. In doing so, they were also struggling to determine just who should be able to make these decisions: doctors, statisticians or drinkers themselves. Opinions about moderate drinking are still divided in Britain, along similar lines to those taken before 1939, and Kneale’s history helps to historicise contemporary arguments about how much drink is enough and how much is too much.
James Kneale examines a subject that has become increasingly central to critical work on the weir... more James Kneale examines a subject that has become increasingly central to critical work on the weird: H. P. Lovecraft’s explicit racism. In recent years a number of Lovecraftian stories have entered into critical dialogues with Lovecraft, including Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. These novels illustrate the ways in which racism makes ordinary places weird or eerie, threatening the mobility and security of their African-American protagonists, deforming their experience of space and time. Ruff and Lavalle present us with the horrors of white America, forcing us to ask whether the cosmic indifference which is so central to Lovecraft’s work affects us equally. In doing so they offer us new insights into the intersections between geography, racism, and the weird.
In August 1835 in Manchester Dr Ralph Barnes Grindrod participated in the ‘First Teetotal Discuss... more In August 1835 in Manchester Dr Ralph Barnes Grindrod participated in the ‘First Teetotal Discussion’, a public debate on temperance with the landlord of a local hotel. Grindrod was reportedly the fi rst British doctor to take the pledge and an early proponent of ‘medical temperance’. In many ways he epitomizes the aspects of temperance we are most familiar with, uniting medicine, morality and political activism in an assault on the drink trade, as reformers tested the possibilities of a newly emerging public sphere (MacFie, 1899; Grierson, 2001; Kneale, 2001). But Grindrod had another, less spectacular part to play in the battle against alcohol. By 1840 he had agreed to be a medical referee for the United Kingdom Total Abstinence Life Association, which would require him to assess the health of individuals seeking life insurance from this company. Grindrod’s role as a referee reminds us that life insurance was set against problematic drinking from the earliest years of organized temperance in Britain, and that there was a good deal more to drink in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than struggles over its regulation. This chapter examines the relationship between drinking and life assurance in Britain between 1840 and 1911. We have borrowed the title – ‘the relations of inebriety to insurance’ – from a paper given by Dr Norman Kerr in 1893 (Proceedings of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, 1893, pp. 12–14). Kerr was well placed to discuss this topic. He was the fi rst president of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, the chair of the British Medical Association’s Inebriates’ Legislation Committee, and one of the
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009
Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism focuses on the everyday and situated use of language. T... more Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism focuses on the everyday and situated use of language. The basic unit of this theory is the utterance which is created in anticipation of future utterances and in response to past utterances. Arguing that all language is formed in a socio-ideological world where certain ways of speaking seek to become dominant, Bakhtin explored how the heterogeneity of language consistently pulls these ascendant ideologies apart. The open, constant mutation and inherently contested make-up of the social and cultural world is further explored in Bakhtin's work on medieval folk culture and in particular the space–time of the carnival. As a series of practices and representations the carnivalesque resists and inverts accepted, ordered, and official cultural categories, principally through exaggeration, ridicule, and a focus on the body (especially the lower bodily regions). The space–time of the carnivalesque is one example of Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope which expresses the inseparability of space and time as it is represented and contributes to the form of literature. Bakhtin's theories of dialogism, the chronotope, and the carnivalesque offer human geographers with a series of interrelated ideas for making sense of society and space.
Transcribed by the American journalist Daniel Kirwan from a performance at the Alhambra in 1871, ... more Transcribed by the American journalist Daniel Kirwan from a performance at the Alhambra in 1871, the last verse of “The Beau of Wotten Wow” illustrates some of the key themes of these four books. It is both a paean to conspicuous consumption and a satirical dig at the ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011
The author William Gibson is clearly interested in space. However, as a novelist rather than a ge... more The author William Gibson is clearly interested in space. However, as a novelist rather than a geographer, Gibson is interested in two kinds of plots: with locations but also with stories. His novels bring these two forms of ‘plot’ together: his narratives essentially involve the location and tracking of missing people and objects though space, as well as complex conspiracies; in his most recent novels— Pattern Recognition and Spook Country—these plots are set in motion by, or become tangled up with, members of security and intelligence services. They therefore seem like perfect examples of post-9/11 popular geopolitical texts. However, these concerns predate 9/11 by many years, and Gibson's plots are driven as much by contingency as conspiracy. As a consequence of this, unforeseen circumstances and the apparently coincidental meeting of characters both play an important role in the narratives. These geographies of conspiracy and coincidence are explored to suggest that, if Gibs...
Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2000. 325 pp. £15.99 paperback ISBN 1 55786 891 3 Cultural Geograph... more Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2000. 325 pp. £15.99 paperback ISBN 1 55786 891 3 Cultural Geography is a textbook designed to give undergraduates a critical introduction to the sub-discipline. It is an important and timely book, emerg-ing as cultural geography is being ...
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2020
Genealogies of life assurance have tended to focus on the governmental possibilities of actuarial... more Genealogies of life assurance have tended to focus on the governmental possibilities of actuarial calculations of mortality, but the case of foreign residence assurance draws attention to other ways in which British companies calculated climate risk between 1840 and 1940. Drawing on archival research, this paper demonstrates that the extra charges imposed on life assurance policies for foreign residence invited conversations about the risks of climate and mortality in countries beyond Britain, drawing on both contemporary climate science and other arguments about climate pathology. Climate risks, however, had to be made to work for both life assurers and policyholders through far‐reaching social‐material networks, and firms frequently tinkered with arrangements of people, ideas, and artefacts in ways that enabled a mapping and governing of such risks. Whether ideas of climate circulating in life assurance were believed or not, they had effects and policyholders submitted to them. Dr...
Hail insurance in Britain emerged as a product by and for farming communities, expanding as wheat... more Hail insurance in Britain emerged as a product by and for farming communities, expanding as wheat production rose in the mid-nineteenth century before declining in the latter decades of the century amidst wide-scale conversion from arable to livestock farming. Drawing on detailed research conducted in the remaining archives of the three major hail insurers in this period, we demonstrate the challenges of establishing a new insurance product for farmers. We argue that to make hail insurance effective, the insurance company’s central office collated and circulated information, rules, and paperwork to enable it to govern farmers, agents, and valuers at a distance. Such networks were fragile and required continual maintenance, whether to enhance reputation, manage farmers’ requests for new products, enforce rules, or tinker with rates in response to perceived risks and competitive pressures. Conceptualizing this emerging insurance business as a fragile network is a useful device demonst...
In 1891 Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville wrote a series of letters to the Times that amounted to what... more In 1891 Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville wrote a series of letters to the Times that amounted to what one commentator described as “a plea for the use of more alcohol.” Though he was denounced by the British Medical Journal, Granville provoked a month-long debate on the merits and dangers of moderate drinking. Granville’s career was highly unorthodox, though common themes emerge from his biography that help explain his arguments for “rational drinking.” He was very much a creature of the developing nineteenth-century public sphere: he had been a hospital and workhouse surgeon; the editor, briefly, of a conservative newspaper, and then a popular medical writer; a statistician using public knowledge to explore social problems and their solutions; and a tireless self-publicist who received both mockery and praise from the satirical press. Granville is almost entirely forgotten now, though he was relatively well known towards the end of his life. However, his ideas remind us that the public’s view of drinking was not solely shaped by the dogmas of temperance and trade, and while he was hardly a typical Victorian doctor, tracing Granville’s engagement with drink also reveals something of the changing nature of the nineteenth-century public sphere.
Kneale describes the problem of defining and measuring moderate drinking in Britain between 1800 ... more Kneale describes the problem of defining and measuring moderate drinking in Britain between 1800 and 1939, drawing on material from arguments made within temperance, medical and (more unusually) life assurance circles. Debating abstinence, moderation and excessive drinking, these authorities engaged with writers and scientists in North America and Europe to establish just how much drink was enough. In doing so, they were also struggling to determine just who should be able to make these decisions: doctors, statisticians or drinkers themselves. Opinions about moderate drinking are still divided in Britain, along similar lines to those taken before 1939, and Kneale’s history helps to historicise contemporary arguments about how much drink is enough and how much is too much.
James Kneale examines a subject that has become increasingly central to critical work on the weir... more James Kneale examines a subject that has become increasingly central to critical work on the weird: H. P. Lovecraft’s explicit racism. In recent years a number of Lovecraftian stories have entered into critical dialogues with Lovecraft, including Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. These novels illustrate the ways in which racism makes ordinary places weird or eerie, threatening the mobility and security of their African-American protagonists, deforming their experience of space and time. Ruff and Lavalle present us with the horrors of white America, forcing us to ask whether the cosmic indifference which is so central to Lovecraft’s work affects us equally. In doing so they offer us new insights into the intersections between geography, racism, and the weird.
In August 1835 in Manchester Dr Ralph Barnes Grindrod participated in the ‘First Teetotal Discuss... more In August 1835 in Manchester Dr Ralph Barnes Grindrod participated in the ‘First Teetotal Discussion’, a public debate on temperance with the landlord of a local hotel. Grindrod was reportedly the fi rst British doctor to take the pledge and an early proponent of ‘medical temperance’. In many ways he epitomizes the aspects of temperance we are most familiar with, uniting medicine, morality and political activism in an assault on the drink trade, as reformers tested the possibilities of a newly emerging public sphere (MacFie, 1899; Grierson, 2001; Kneale, 2001). But Grindrod had another, less spectacular part to play in the battle against alcohol. By 1840 he had agreed to be a medical referee for the United Kingdom Total Abstinence Life Association, which would require him to assess the health of individuals seeking life insurance from this company. Grindrod’s role as a referee reminds us that life insurance was set against problematic drinking from the earliest years of organized temperance in Britain, and that there was a good deal more to drink in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than struggles over its regulation. This chapter examines the relationship between drinking and life assurance in Britain between 1840 and 1911. We have borrowed the title – ‘the relations of inebriety to insurance’ – from a paper given by Dr Norman Kerr in 1893 (Proceedings of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, 1893, pp. 12–14). Kerr was well placed to discuss this topic. He was the fi rst president of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, the chair of the British Medical Association’s Inebriates’ Legislation Committee, and one of the
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009
Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism focuses on the everyday and situated use of language. T... more Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism focuses on the everyday and situated use of language. The basic unit of this theory is the utterance which is created in anticipation of future utterances and in response to past utterances. Arguing that all language is formed in a socio-ideological world where certain ways of speaking seek to become dominant, Bakhtin explored how the heterogeneity of language consistently pulls these ascendant ideologies apart. The open, constant mutation and inherently contested make-up of the social and cultural world is further explored in Bakhtin's work on medieval folk culture and in particular the space–time of the carnival. As a series of practices and representations the carnivalesque resists and inverts accepted, ordered, and official cultural categories, principally through exaggeration, ridicule, and a focus on the body (especially the lower bodily regions). The space–time of the carnivalesque is one example of Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope which expresses the inseparability of space and time as it is represented and contributes to the form of literature. Bakhtin's theories of dialogism, the chronotope, and the carnivalesque offer human geographers with a series of interrelated ideas for making sense of society and space.
Transcribed by the American journalist Daniel Kirwan from a performance at the Alhambra in 1871, ... more Transcribed by the American journalist Daniel Kirwan from a performance at the Alhambra in 1871, the last verse of “The Beau of Wotten Wow” illustrates some of the key themes of these four books. It is both a paean to conspicuous consumption and a satirical dig at the ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011
The author William Gibson is clearly interested in space. However, as a novelist rather than a ge... more The author William Gibson is clearly interested in space. However, as a novelist rather than a geographer, Gibson is interested in two kinds of plots: with locations but also with stories. His novels bring these two forms of ‘plot’ together: his narratives essentially involve the location and tracking of missing people and objects though space, as well as complex conspiracies; in his most recent novels— Pattern Recognition and Spook Country—these plots are set in motion by, or become tangled up with, members of security and intelligence services. They therefore seem like perfect examples of post-9/11 popular geopolitical texts. However, these concerns predate 9/11 by many years, and Gibson's plots are driven as much by contingency as conspiracy. As a consequence of this, unforeseen circumstances and the apparently coincidental meeting of characters both play an important role in the narratives. These geographies of conspiracy and coincidence are explored to suggest that, if Gibs...
Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2000. 325 pp. £15.99 paperback ISBN 1 55786 891 3 Cultural Geograph... more Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2000. 325 pp. £15.99 paperback ISBN 1 55786 891 3 Cultural Geography is a textbook designed to give undergraduates a critical introduction to the sub-discipline. It is an important and timely book, emerg-ing as cultural geography is being ...
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2020
Genealogies of life assurance have tended to focus on the governmental possibilities of actuarial... more Genealogies of life assurance have tended to focus on the governmental possibilities of actuarial calculations of mortality, but the case of foreign residence assurance draws attention to other ways in which British companies calculated climate risk between 1840 and 1940. Drawing on archival research, this paper demonstrates that the extra charges imposed on life assurance policies for foreign residence invited conversations about the risks of climate and mortality in countries beyond Britain, drawing on both contemporary climate science and other arguments about climate pathology. Climate risks, however, had to be made to work for both life assurers and policyholders through far‐reaching social‐material networks, and firms frequently tinkered with arrangements of people, ideas, and artefacts in ways that enabled a mapping and governing of such risks. Whether ideas of climate circulating in life assurance were believed or not, they had effects and policyholders submitted to them. Dr...
Hail insurance in Britain emerged as a product by and for farming communities, expanding as wheat... more Hail insurance in Britain emerged as a product by and for farming communities, expanding as wheat production rose in the mid-nineteenth century before declining in the latter decades of the century amidst wide-scale conversion from arable to livestock farming. Drawing on detailed research conducted in the remaining archives of the three major hail insurers in this period, we demonstrate the challenges of establishing a new insurance product for farmers. We argue that to make hail insurance effective, the insurance company’s central office collated and circulated information, rules, and paperwork to enable it to govern farmers, agents, and valuers at a distance. Such networks were fragile and required continual maintenance, whether to enhance reputation, manage farmers’ requests for new products, enforce rules, or tinker with rates in response to perceived risks and competitive pressures. Conceptualizing this emerging insurance business as a fragile network is a useful device demonst...
In 1891 Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville wrote a series of letters to the Times that amounted to what... more In 1891 Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville wrote a series of letters to the Times that amounted to what one commentator described as “a plea for the use of more alcohol.” Though he was denounced by the British Medical Journal, Granville provoked a month-long debate on the merits and dangers of moderate drinking. Granville’s career was highly unorthodox, though common themes emerge from his biography that help explain his arguments for “rational drinking.” He was very much a creature of the developing nineteenth-century public sphere: he had been a hospital and workhouse surgeon; the editor, briefly, of a conservative newspaper, and then a popular medical writer; a statistician using public knowledge to explore social problems and their solutions; and a tireless self-publicist who received both mockery and praise from the satirical press. Granville is almost entirely forgotten now, though he was relatively well known towards the end of his life. However, his ideas remind us that the public’s view of drinking was not solely shaped by the dogmas of temperance and trade, and while he was hardly a typical Victorian doctor, tracing Granville’s engagement with drink also reveals something of the changing nature of the nineteenth-century public sphere.
Uploads
Papers by James Kneale