The selections below from 1826 capture the advance of liberal ideas in Britain, as reformers systematically challenged entrenched aristocratic monopolies over trade and education. In economics, a growing consensus pushed back against the protectionist Corn Laws in favor of free trade, demanding policies that served broader social interests rather than just wealthy landowners. This same egalitarian impulse spilled into the public sphere, with Whig reformers supporting educating the working classes through accessible literature and Mechanics’ Institutes. At the same time, the newly founded London University sought to overcome the exclusionary traditions of Oxford and Cambridge.

I most enjoyed William Hazlitt’s essay discussing which historical figures one would most like to have met and chatted with. Hazlitt is an excellent writer whose style is far beyond most of his contemporaries. In 1826, Hazlitt released a collection of essays called The Plain Speaker. I opted not to cover it since I read his Spirit of the Age last year but recommend from it the essay Reading Old Books (which I spend a good bit of time doing). One book I didn’t get to is Charles Babbage’s book on life insurance, which was written after his brief tenure as an actuary. If I’ve missed anything interesting from 1826 that you enjoy, shoot an email my way at brettcmullins(at)gmail.com.

Economics
On the Corn Laws by J. C. L. de Sismondi
A Letter to a Political Economist by Samuel Bailey
Diffusion of Knowledge

Philosophy
Elements of Logic by Richard Whately
Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen by William Hazlitt
Formation of Opinions by James Mill

Mathematics
Lardner’s Differential and Integral Calculus
On a method of expressing by signs the action of machinery by Charles Babbage

Miscellaneous
On the Supernatural in Poetry by Ann Radcliffe
The London University by Thomas Babington Macaulay

Economics

On the Corn Laws

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Author: J. C. L. de Sismondi

Publication: The New Monthly Magazine

Link: HathiTrust

The Corn laws were trade restrictions on importing low-cost grain imposed by the UK in 1815 in an effort to protect domestic agriculture. The resulting high price of grain ate a considerable portion of laborers’ budgets and, unsurprisingly, caused much unrest. On the positive side, this stimulated economic thinking on international trade and the dynamics of prices.

The overwhelming consensus among economists in the 1820s was in favor of free trade. Following Ricardo, the typical account argues that land varies widely with respect to the amount of grain it can produce. As grain is increasingly farmed, the productivity of the worst land currently in use diminishes. By trading with countries with more productive farm land, at least at the margin, the UK could put their capital to better use such as manufacturing.

Sismondi offers a more nuanced picture of the debate. The grain producing eastern European states do not face the same market forces as UK landowners, since much of their labor is forced. As a result, grain could be sold profitably at a significantly lower price than is viable in the UK. Opening the market fully risks hollowing out domestic agriculture and incurring a dependency on foreign markets. This is compounded by the UK having large conglomerate farms rather than small family farms, which are more resilient to price fluctuations. This essay is part of the second edition of Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d’économie politique.

A Letter to a Political Economist

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Author: Samuel Bailey

Link: Google Books

Samuel Bailey’s anonymously-published 1825 book A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value is an enjoyable read that offers a convincing argument against the labor theories of value from David Ricardo and friends. It was attacked in a juvenile article in the Westminster Review, likely penned by James Mill. This review accuses Bailey of all sorts of misdeeds from boisterousness and economic ignorance to “arguing with shadows” but comes across as hurt feelings on part of the reviewer.

Bailey systematically dismantles the substantive points of the critique with his usual style and clarity. The bulk of the discussion centers on whether or not Ricardo consciously used value in two different senses: exchange value and labor-based value. Bailey makes the case that it is more likely that Ricardo mistakenly slipped from one notion of value into another. However, this point seems tangential to Bailey’s book and does not add much other than rebutting the review.

Diffusion of Knowledge

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Publication: Edinburgh Review

Link: Google Books

The views of the liberal reformers and their radical bedfellows were gaining ground by the mid-1820s, no longer seen solely as subverters of British society. Popular education was championed by Whig MPs such as Henry Brougham as a catalyst for social improvement and saw results with the investment in Mechanics’ Institutes in many industrial cities as well as the founding of a new English university outside of Oxford and Cambridge.

This progress was surveyed and defended in an 1825 pamphlet by Brougham. A responding pamphlet soon appeared signed as “a Country Gentleman” arguing that popular education will invariably cause social subversion. The present review finds this response both narrow-minded and distasteful. Our country gentleman views society as a rigid pyramid, where each station has its role to play. If the laboring classes become educated, why would they not desire the fruits of higher stations, he asks. At the same time, he finds the prospect of popular education wholly absurd and comparable to educating farm animals.

Leaving our country gentleman behind, the reviewer (possibly Brougham) offers thoughts on advancing popular education. While Mechanics’ Institutes are important, they do not scale to the breadth of the countryside. Only books can reach the wider population. For many topics, however, such introductory books do not presently exist. To this end, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded to produce accessible surveys of the natural sciences and their practice. The series was called the Library of Useful Knowledge and inspired other series such as the Very Short Introductions or the MIT Press Essential Knowledge books today.

Philosophy

Elements of Logic

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Author: Richard Whately

Link: Google Books

In early nineteenth-century Britain, prevailing thought favored the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke, leaving the old syllogistic logic in the scholastic dustbin. This book seeks to revive the Aristotelian logic and rejuvenate deductivism by arguing that all valid reasoning is ultimately deductive.

The book is structured into three parts: Aristotelian deductive logic, informal logic, and empirical reasoning. The first provides a standard treatment of the Aristotelian logic, including the square of opposition and common syllogistic forms, e.g., Barbara. The second part shifts to informal logic, detailing common fallacies and the rhetorical sleights of hand that routinely yield invalid syllogisms. Whately tackles this section with palpable reluctance; his tone suggests he views the messy realities of rhetorical deception as somewhat beneath the formal elegance of the syllogism. In the footnotes, Whately points to the inadequacies of the standard logic text used at Oxford: Henry Aldrich’s 1691 Artis Logicæ Compendium.

The third section contains Whately’s most interesting arguments, where he attempts to reclaim empirical reasoning for the Aristotelian camp. He argues that all valid reasoning is ultimately deductive, effectively stripping Bacon’s new logic of its claim to have supplanted ancient methods. To Whately, induction is not a genuinely new method of reasoning from specific instances to general rules, but rather a sneaky application of the deductive syllogism. Every inductive leap relies on a hidden major premise: the assumption that the specific observed cases are uniformly representative of the general whole. By exposing this hidden premise, Whately neatly folds scientific empiricism right back into the traditional syllogistic framework.

The Elements of Logic quickly became the standard logic text in Britain for the next two decades until it was overshadowed by J. S. Mill’s A System of Logic (1843). Whately’s book grew out of an entry written for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana and published in 1824.

Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen

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Author: William Hazlitt

Publication: The New Monthly Magazine

Link: Click here

Hazlitt asks an interesting question: if you could call forth from the dead and chat with any historical figure, who would you choose and what would you ask? The luminaries of the prior century? In Hazlitt’s case, this is Locke and Newton. These are dismissed, since their best thought is contained in their texts (this is a questionable take!). What about towering figures from the past such as Shakespeare? How could he possibly live up to his mythology? What about a learned person in Shakespeare’s circle? Would they be honest in resolving historical disputes?

There are logistical considerations to be had: one needs to be able to effectively communicate with their interlocutor. Hazlitt breaks off the discussion before it descends into the absurd. This entertaining article is a dialogue set while Hazlitt was in the circle of the poet Charles Lamb around the turn of the century.

Formation of Opinions

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Author: James Mill

Publication: Westminster Review

Link: HathiTrust

Samuel Bailey’s anonymously published Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions (1821) explores how beliefs are formed in the mind and how it interacts with social forces. This review focuses on Bailey’s most interesting claim: that belief is strictly involuntary. Rather than being a conscious product of the will, belief is an unavoidable function of the evidence presented to the mind and considered.

This presents a challenge for utilitarianism. Since beliefs drive actions (whether deterministically or not) yet are involuntary functions of evidence, the focus of moral evaluation must shift entirely to a person’s epistemic practices: how rigorously, fairly, and faithfully they seek out and consider evidence. Oddly, however, Mill also seems to argue that having justified beliefs, i.e., holding beliefs for the right reasons, is more important than having accurate beliefs, which does not seem to square with naive utilitarianism. Mill concludes with an amusing critique of religious institutions. He proposes that the clergy are the least faithful segment of society, since they systematically counsel the public against rigorous, reliable practices of obtaining and evaluating evidence.

Mathematics

Lardner’s Differential and Integral Calculus

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Publication: The Westminster Review

Link: HathiTrust

At the turn of the nineteenth century, mathematical analysis in Britain was Newtonian. Being bound up with geometry and applications in the natural sciences based on the notion of fluxion, British mathematics fell behind the analytical methods developed on the continent, e.g., those by Lagrange. One issue with the Newtonian approach is its clunky notation for derivatives and integrals. For instance, if $y$ is a function of $x$, then the derivative of $y$ with respect to $x$ is denoted by $\dot y$. Higher order derivatives get additional dots, integrals get boxes, and functions with multiple arguments can become a proper mess!

The tide quickly began to shift due to efforts by young mathematicians at Cambridge. Robert Woodhouse produced a text in 1803 advocating for the Leibniz notation but otherwise criticizing continental methodology. With the Leibniz notation, we can write the derivative more clearly as $\frac{dy}{dx}$. A group of Cambridge students including Charles Babbage and John Herschel formed the Analytical Society in 1812 to push back about the conservatism of English mathematicians, e.g., by translating French mathematical texts into English. By 1817, through these efforts, continental methods replaced the Newtonian approach on the Tripos, the undergraduate capstone exam at Cambridge.

Dionysius Lardner’s book An Elementary treatise on the Differential and Integral Calculus (1825) continued this wave as one of the earliest texts covering introductory analysis to employ continental notation. This review finds that the book has strong coverage of differential calculus but shows a weak understanding of integration, differential equations, and finite differences. The reviewer takes the opportunity to get in a dig at the Irish by noting that the balance of the text is reflective of the quality of students at Trinity College Dublin, where Lardner lectured at the time.

Much of the review is spent complaining about the current state of mathematics at Cambridge. Our reviewer thinks the continental methods suspect in how divorced they are from applications in the natural sciences and disdains the smugness of current students who feel they are advancing the field through the use of more powerful tools. Yet, in an evergreen sort of complaint, students today tend to be spoon-fed mathematics in an “reading-made-easy style” while students of the prior generation plowed through Newton’s Principia and other terse tomes.

On a method of expressing by signs the action of machinery

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Author: Charles Babbage

Publication: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

Link: JSTOR

The difference engine was a mechanical calculator proposed by Charles Babbage in 1822 to tabulate functions via approximation using polynomials. Such a machine could reduce human error in the calculation of mathematical tables, which were essential in the early nineteenth century for navigation, engineering, and scientific research.

Babbage’s designs were ambitious, requiring precision engineering and manufacturing that was not available at the time. This, in turn, led to the development of new engineering techniques. This short paper introduces a mechanical notation for describing the exact, successive motions of components within a complex machine. Using a grid with one dimension denoting time and the other the machine’s components, Babbage’s notation allows for a systematic representation of the machine’s periodic operation. He provides detailed examples of a clock and a water pump.

Miscellaneous

On the Supernatural in Poetry

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Author: Ann Radcliffe

Publication: The New Monthly Magazine

Link: Click here

Ann Radcliffe was a late-eighteenth century novelist and a pioneer of Gothic literature, best known for The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). This article is a dialogue excerpted from the introduction of her posthumous Gaston de Blondeville (1826), written in 1802. Our two interlocutors discuss the relationship between the sublime and the supernatural in English thought and literature.

Radcliffe’s novels employed the supernatural as a major plot device, yet often resolved into a material explanation at the conclusion. The most interesting part of the dialogue concerns the distinction between horror and terror. The former is a visceral reaction that makes one recoil from the world in defense. The latter is a more intellectual reaction that stimulates the imagination. Radcliffe sought to evoke terror and thereby the sublime in the reader through the imagery and motifs of the supernatural.

The London University

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Author: Thomas Babington Macaulay

Publication: The Edinburgh Review

Link: HathiTrust

In early 1826, London University was founded as the first English alternative to Oxford and Cambridge, though not yet legally granting degrees. Building on an Edinburgh Review article from the prior year, Macaulay advocates for the university in London by attacking the state of higher education in England, which holds back national progress by clinging to medieval traditions.

The London University has two advantages over its esteemed peers: access and curricular relevance. Since students were required to live at either Oxford or Cambridge, the exorbitant costs of residency priced out much of the commercial and professional classes. By establishing a non-residential university in the capital, young men could live at home and attain study more economically. Moreover, Oxford and Cambridge required students to assent to the Anglican faith. Macaulay defends the new university’s secular model, asserting that religion should be a private matter left to families, not a prerequisite for higher learning.

A curriculum focused on Greek, Latin, and mathematics is both stagnant and antiquated, given the recent progress in the natural sciences. The London University would teach courses that the ancient universities ignored: political economy, modern languages, physical sciences, chemistry, and medicine. The notion of an outdated curriculum is another evergreen complaint in academia.