The Royal Society of Arts
The Royal Society of Arts, 1754-1954. By Derek Hudson and K. W. Luckhurst. (John Murray. 30s.) THE Industrial Revolution, whose waves now lap the coasts of every continent, began in England. Those who have never lived outside its sphere and who read only conventional history, often profess to doubt the value of that rapid and tremendous change, but no one doubts its importance or its place of origin. The dull thump of the first " Engine for Raising Water by Fire" echoes through history louder than the trumpets of war.
We British have the reputation for 'muddling through' and it is interesting to trace the impulses, social stresses and logical steps which put this nation in the industrial lead.
The Royal Society or 'Invisible College' was the first of three spontaneous and important guiding institutions which evolved, its original members by no means confining their interest to pure science. Its secretaries laid regularly before them communications on such things as tanning, building construction or the making of felt hats as well as observing eclipses, sitting over Newton till he had worked the Calculus out afresh or superintending the setting out of a collection of Loewenhoek's tiny microscopes.
The next of these guiding bodies was the Royal Society of Arts whose bi-centenary is celebrated this year. Equally interested in economics and technics, often overlapping (or associating itself with) the work of the Royal Society, it had a rather different bias and generally used contrasting methods, its most resounding achievement being to promote (largely through its president, Prince Albert) the 1851 Exhibition.
This society has seldom attempted fundamental research; what its members have concentrated on has been the encouragement of invention, the diffusion of information and the popularisation of new methods, while Art—in its modern sense—has always been a strong interest.
A third early guiding body is the Royal Institution, founded more than a century later than the Royal Society and more than a genera- tion later than the Society of Arts.
The present volume gives an amusingly inconsequent account of the origin of the Society of Arts: William Shipley ... was an obscure drawing master in North- ampton when he conceived the scheme on which he based the Society of Arts .... It was that industry should be stimulated by means of prizes drawn from a fund contributed by public spirited people. The idea of prizes came to him from the Northampton horse fair. He learned that its success was largely due to the insti- tution of horse-racing meetings and that many of these meetings had been promoted by the King and others who gave plates or prizes.
His first 'proposals' were for Raising by subscription a fund to be distributed in premiums for the promoting of improvements in the liberal arts and sciences, manufactures etc.
Mr. Shipley was not a drawing master for nothing. The Society's first concerns were with the production of madder and cobalt and With The encouragement of boys and girls in the art of drawing, it being the opinion of all present that the art of drawing is absolutely necessary in many employments, trades and manufactures.
Romney, Cosway, Smart and Nollekens were among those 'en- Couraged.' Flaxman, at the age of eleven, won a prize for modelling in clay, Landseer, at the age of ten, for the drawing of a dog, an Millais, at the age of nine, for a large drawing of the Battle of Bannockburn.
The present volume chronicles the work of the Society through the most varied activities imaginable. We see it promoting the Agri' cultural Revolution in this country, holding competitions for raising silkworms and olives in the warmer -parts of America, trying to popularise the use of a jointed brush instead of 'climbing boys, holding consultations with Benjamin Franklin and Faraday, investi• gating the application of 'Windy Power,' giving prizes for improNe' ments to the Davy Lamp and—coming to our own times—the book shows us two elegant exhibition-rooms in 1935 and 1951.
Thus the book chronicles an extraordinary complexity of voluntary. ingenious and spontaneous work. Asian and African anthropologists—turning the tables—are beginning (and high time too) to take an outside view of the strange culture-patterns of the West and the roots which make us both the most powerful and the strangest if not the happiest or most fraternal societies. Let us hope that they will take a look at this book, at the records of the other two Societies and of the British Association, For in these they will see, unselfconsciously displayed,,in the case of a pioneer nation many of the elements, the impulses and the emotional directives, so to say, that have made us Westerners (a§ Professor Arnold Toynbee has pointed out) the least typical example' of Homo Sapiens.
AMABEL WILLIAMS-ELLIg
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