Abstract
This journal has a personal interest to Mr. Ballard’s descendants as being the work of their ancestor, but they have published it in the hope that it may be found to be of interest to others as a picture of the life and times in England in the year of the Battle of Waterloo, as seen through the eyes of a patriotic young American.
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Notes
Franklin medals were awarded to the most deserving boys in the upper class in the Latin, writing, and grammar schools. In 1801 Ballard was one of twenty-one recipients of the medal presented by John Adams, who had just been defeated in the presidential election. See the Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1877 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1878), 40–41.
[Professor J. W. Webster, convicted of murdering Dr. George Parkman on November 23, 1849, and later hanged.] A chapter describing the murder, including the attempt to incinerate Parkman’s body is provided by H. B. Irving in A Book of Remarkable Criminals (London: Cassell, 1918).
This passage is from Robert Southey’s (1774–1843) epic poem Madoc (1805).
The Liverpool Arms in Castle Street, according to The Stranger in Liverpool: or, An Historical and Descriptive View of the Town of Liverpool and its Environs (Liverpool: Thomas Kaye, 1807), was relatively new in 1815 and run by an innkeeper named Lillyman.
Silliman’s travel narrative, A Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland, and of Two Passages over the Atlantic in the Years 1805 and 1806 (Boston: Howe and Deforest, and Increase Cook and Co., 1812), enjoyed broad readership in the United States.
See John Aikin’s The Country from Thirty to Forty Miles Round Manchester (1795; Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1968.), 348.
Thomas Kaye’s guidebook, The Stranger in Liverpool, Or, An Historical and Descriptive View of the Town of Liverpool (Liverpool: Thomas Kaye, 1812) describes this site as “an institution of this kind, under the appellation of a School for the Indigent Blind has been established, and carried on in Liverpool since the year 1791, with remarkable success.
Around 1830, according to William T. Jackman’s Development of Transportation in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), “the general average fares by mail coaches were 5 d. [pence] per mile inside and 3 d. per mile outside; and by the stage coaches 3 d. inside and 2 d. outside” (344).
The term still has some cultural resonance, at least in England, having been used by Billy Bragg (1957-) on the 2002 CD England, Half English (London: Cooking Vinyl CD 222, 2002).
At the New Lanark mills, Robert Owen (1771–1858), author of A New View of Society (London: Privately Printed, 1813), was driven to develop a system of education for children at New Lanark as well as a socialist model of manufacturing.
John Bull, the nickname given to the “typical” British citizen, is often featured as a stocky individual dressed in the clothes of a country squire. John Bull functions in illustrations and cartoons in the same way as Uncle Sam in an American context. The American author Washington Irving (1783–1859) described John Bull as follows: John Bull, and has no relish for frippery and nicknacks. His very proneness to be gulled by strangers, and to pay extravagantly for absurdities, is excused under the plea of munificence—for John is always more generous than wise. [He is] a plain, downright, matter-of-fact fellow, with much less of poetry about him than rich prose. There is little of romance in his nature, but a vast deal of a strong natural feeling. He excels in humour more than in wit; is jolly rather than gay; melancholy rather than morose; can easily be moved to a sudden tear or surprised into a broad laugh; but he loathes sentiment and has no turn for light pleasantry. He is a boon companion, if you allow him to have his humour and to talk about himself; and he will stand by a friend in a quarrel with life and purse, however soundly he may be cudgelled. … [He is] a plain, downright, matter-of-fact fellow, with much less of poetry about him than rich prose. There is little of romance in his nature, but a vast deal of a strong natural feeling. He excels in humour more than in wit; is jolly rather than gay; melancholy rather than morose; can easily be moved to a sudden tear or surprised into a broad laugh; but he loathes sentiment and has no turn for light pleasantry. He is a boon companion, if you allow him to have his humour and to talk about himself; and he will stand by a friend in a quarrel with life and purse, however soundly he may be cudgelled. The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (New York: Maynard, Merrill, 1906), 432–33.
The satiric dramatist and novelist Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was one of the early pioneers of the novel. His work includes Tom Jones (1749),
which remains his best known work, and Joseph Andrews (1742),
which is a satirical twist on Samuel Richardson’s (1689–1761) melodramatic novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740).
See J. H. Nodal and George Milner, A Glossary of the Lancashire Dialect (Manchester: Alexander Ireland, 1875), 51.
The Salamanca is depicted in the background of George Walker’s 1814 illustration of a coal worker in The Costume of Yorkshire (Leeds: Robinson & Son, 1814).
See Feltham, Picture of London for 1809 (London: R. Phillips, 1809), 200–201.
W. Hazlitt, A. R. Waller, and Arnold Glover, The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 8 (London: J. M. Dent, 1903). 224–25.
Describing the Bank of England, Feltham wrote, “The business of this room will greatly amuse the curious stranger, although he comprehends nothing of the detail, for the throng, the hurry, the seeming confusion, and the busy eager countenances, he will perceive there” (Picture of London for 1809 [London: R. Phillips, 1809], 96).
Feltham’s observations are confirmed in the description provided in Ackermann’s Microcosm: “Here, from the hours of eleven to three, a crowd of eager money-dealers assemble, and the avidity of gain displays itself in a variety of shapes, truly ludicrous to the disinterested observer.” Microcosm of London, vol. 1 (London: R. Ackermann, 1808–1811), 41.
John Thomas Smith, The Streets of London: Anecdotes of Their More Celebrated Residents (London: Bentley, 1861), 392.
See Leigh Hunt’s The Autobiography (London: Constable, 1903), 147.
On March 31, 1815, a woman named Margaret Moore attempted to steal the king’s crown while taking a tour of the Tower of London. Moore accumulated some debt and was reputed by friends and acquaintances to be deranged or “insane.” Still, when asked why she attempted to steal the crown, she testified, “I thought it a pity that so valuable a thing should remain there, while half the nation was starving, for want of bread! I wished, also, at the time, to take the whole of what was there, and give it to the public!” Cited in John Ashton Social England Under the Regency (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 11.
See Richard Shiel’s Sketches of the Irish Bar (New York: Redfield, 1854), 174.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omnia of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 44.
Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist (1846; Orchard Park: Broadview Press, 2005), 24.
Alexander Pope and Adolphus William Ward, The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope [London: MacMillan & Co., 1893], epistle iii, ll. 339, 1733–1734, 255
Richard Cumberland (1732–1811) wrote plays, poetry, fiction, criticism, and a memoir. Wheel of Fortune, written in 1795, was successful and helped contribute to his financial independence.
His play The Jew, or the Benevolent Hebrew (1794)
presented a central Jewish character in a positive light and an earlier work, The West Indian (1771), a study of prejudice, was performed frequently in many American cities, including Boston.
Byron performed the role of Penruddock in amateur theatricals, and the play is featured in the poem “An Occasional Prologue, Delivered By The Author Previous To The Performance Of ‘the Wheel Of Fortune’ At A Private Theatre,” published in Hours of Idleness (1807).
George Colman (the younger; 1762–1836) was born in London, the son of a theater manager and playwright. Despite his father’s interest in having him pursue law as a career, Colman followed in his father’s footsteps and was immensely successful as a playwright. He managed the Haymarket Theatre but encountered enormous debts incurred by his father and struggled to repay his creditors. Ways and Means, a farce written in 1788,
was surpassed in popularity perhaps only by his play John Bull (1803), which offered audiences a patriotic sense of self in response to the threat from Napoleon.
The poet William Blake (1775–1827) empathizes with the poorly treated boys in two poems in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794).
Oliver Twist is almost apprenticed to a chimney sweep by the name of Gamfield, whose reputation, we are told, suffers under “the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death already.” In his his essay “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers” (1822), collected in Essays Of Elia (London: J. M. Dent, 1941),
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), novelist, cleric, and reformer, based his children’s classic, The Water Babies (1862–63), on a fantasy based on Tom the chimney sweep, who is transformed into a clean and sprightly “water baby” after falling into a river and drowning.
See Wordsworth, Poems, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1977), 574–75.
See Augustus John Cuthbert Hare, Walks in London (London: Rout-ledge, 1878), 318.
See Anthony and Richard Mortimer’s The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994).
Jane Austen was not particularly impressed when, in 1814, she saw her in Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage: a Tragedy, a play by Thomas Southerne (1660–1746) that was adapted by the actor and manager David Garrick (1717–1779).
Deirdre Le Faye. Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 283.
Benjamin Thompson (1775/6–1816), playwright and translator, was so successful with his translation of August von Kotzebue’s (1761–1819) Menschenhass und Reue (1790), which became The Stranger, he was often referred to as “Stranger Thompson.”
Smollett’s fiction, including Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751),
was influenced by Lesage, as were the novels of Henry Fielding (1707–1754), particularly his History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749).
William Hazlitt’s (1778–1830) essay “The Indian Jugglers” begins with a description of their impressive skills. “Seeing the Indian Jugglers,” Hazlitt writes, “makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what is there that I can do as well as this? Nothing.” Table Talk: Original Essays on Men and Manners (1828; London: C. Templeman, 1857), 100–1.
The earliest source for the poem seems to be George Nicholson’s The Cambrian Traveller’s Guide: And Pocket Companion (Stourport: Printed for George Nicholson, 1808), which might have been available to Ballard.
Roque is a central character in George Colman’s play The Mountaineers (1793).
For a description of residences attacked by the mob and the measures taken to protect private and public property, see James Bonar’s “The Disposition of Troops in London, March 1815,” English Historical Review 16, no. 62 (April 1901): 348–54.
See Cowper, The Task (1785; Philadelphia: Bennet and Walton, 1811). ll. 729–40, 100.
In Ben Jonson’s (1572–1637) The Devil is an Ass (1616), Pug, the lesser devil, claims ancestral ownership of the cavern, calling it by its more familiar name “The Devil’s Arse.”
Micah Hall, an “attorney-at-law,” died in 1804. His epitaph (partially in Latin) is widely noted in travel narratives. In All the Year Round, Dickens writes of attending church in Castleton and notes that Hall’s epitaph “taught me as much as the sermon.” See “A Sunday in Peak-land,” in All the Year Round (London: F. M. Evans & Co., 1895), 275.
William Andrews, Curious Epitaphs (London: William Andrews & Co., 1899), 216.
See Cowper and Benham, The Poetical Works of William Cowper (London: MacMillan, 1889), ll. 317–24. 82.
Byron, having attended the Haymarket Theatre to see Coates portraying Lothario in Nicholas Rowe’s (1674–1718) The Fair Penitent, wrote that Coates, “performed Lothario in a damned and damnable manner.”
See Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journal’s of Lord Byron (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1830), 111).
George Colman’s Ali Baba; or, The Forty Thieves, Destroyed by Morgiana, a Slave, with music by Thomas Kelly (1762–1826), was first performed at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in 1806.
See Frances Terpak, “Free Time, Free Spirit: Popular Entertainments in Gainsborough’s Era,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 2 (June 2007): 209–28.
The Glass-Working Exhibition of one Mr. Finn is described in Leigh’s New Picture of London (1824–25).
“Din most horrible” is a quote from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (London: George Bell & Sons, 1885), 52.
Ballard is quoting from James Beattie’s (1735–1803) The Minstrel; or The Progress of Genius (1771), stanza 50.
In addition to the Bee-Hive, A Musical Farce in Two Acts (1811) by the surgeon John Gideon Millingen (1782–1849),
Ballard saw Robert Jameson’s Love and Gout (1814)
and George Colman’s The Blue Devils (1798), which were also performed that evening.
According to the Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland (New Haven: Converse, 1820) by Benjamin Silliman, the American scientist who visited England in 1805, the alien office was “of recent establishment and was instituted in consequence of the abuse of the almost unrestrained liberty which foreigners had, till then enjoyed in England.
Charles Moulton describes the occasion in his Library of Literary Criticism (Buffalo, NY: Moulton, 1902), 81.
See Washington Irving, The Complete Works: Salmagundi, ed. Bruce I. Granger and Martha Hartzog (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 104.
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Rauch, A. (2009). The Journal of Joseph Ballard. In: Rauch, A. (eds) England in 1815. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618039_2
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