Fossils and Factories

William Turner's Northern Tour 1779-98
by Professor Jon Mee
This talk will trace a northern tour made by the Reverend William Turner, founder of the Lit & Phil, in 1797 and discuss the tensions in his vision of a ‘transpennine enlightenment’ that was bringing new knowledge and prosperity but also new forms of exploitation and uncertainty into the region.
In the final decades of the eighteenth century, travellers were becoming as interested in reporting industrial development and scientific information as they were in describing picturesque scenes. Turner's route was a reverse J: south into Durham, then the woollen manufacturing districts of Yorkshire, and then across the Pennines to the heartland of the industrial revolution in the Lancashire cotton industry, before finishing in Cheshire. Turner reported his findings in a paper given to the Lit Phil on 8 August 1797. His abiding interest in Chemistry and Geology are evident as is his sense that development should respect moral limits. He was reluctant to use the fossil records to question religious truths too closely, and also carried out a blistering attack on the use of children as factory labour, which he saw as little better than the colonial slavery against which he campaigned his whole life.
Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-century Studies at the University of York. Jon's research has been a shaping force in scholarship on the Romantic period in recent years.
His numerous publications in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies include Conversable Worlds Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was nominated for the Louis Gottschalk Prize (2012) of the American Society of the Eighteenth-Century Studies and the James Russell Lowell Prize (2012) of the MLA, and praised as 'impressive, exhaustive and dazzling', and Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford University Press, 2003), welcomed in YWES as ‘without a doubt the most important contribution to general Romantic era studies this year'. Jon has taught at the Australian National University, Oxford University and Warwick.
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