Website of the month

Vive la Revolution Bruce Ticevisits an industrial strength resource www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/library.stm

In Robert Bage’s 1787 novel The Fair Syrian the two principal protagonists St Claur and St Flos fight a duel in which the latter is mortally wounded. Enquiring after his ailing adversary, St Claur asks if any of his ‘vital parts’ are damaged, adding that all will be well, for they now live in an age in which ‘the science of surgery is intelligence itself’. Here, then, is the marriage of rational thought and scientific endeavour pitted against the laws of nature which would otherwise dictate that the hero bleed to death. Man is

period during which so many old values would be turned on their head and so many new ideas come to fruition. Doubtless, it is this uniqueness which led the Lottery New Opportunities Fund to sponsor the creation of a web resource to celebrate the people, places and ideas so bound up in this revolution. ‘Revolutionary Players’ charts this uprising through a number of different strands which are seamlessly interwoven to produce a cogent literary and manufactory account of the region, the people and the age.

standing on the brink of controlling the world by his own industry; that same industry which hails a new era of discovery across the whole field of human knowledge. Indeed it is fitting that these lines should have been written by Robert Bage, a polymathic Staffordshire industrialist who at one time ran a slitting mill in partnership with Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Garbett. Bage himself is almost a paradigm of the manufactory and intellectual revolution that swept across the West Midlands from the early 1700s onwards, changing both the physical and metaphysical topography of the country forever. It is difficult to think of a

Try also finding Robert Mynors’ grisly work on trepanning the skull or the poetic soliloquy of Hannah Moore’s black slave forced to watch her child burn

Principally this comprises a huge digital resource of material culled from many of the museums and galleries of the region, where the mundane – an engraved advert for the Leamington Spa Post Office and Temperance Commercial Hotel – rubs shoulders with the visionary – Wright’s ‘A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery’ – and the bizarre – views from Richard Green’s Museum of Curiosities – each with a pithy commentary. Bibliographically speaking, the so-called ‘Digital Library’ is the most useful of the resources, embracing some 450 multifarious textura of the age. An essay on Bage’s utopian novels is here, as are works such as Billing’s Men and Things of Modern England, 1856 and Bisset’s Magnificent Guide for Birmingham, 1808, the latter scanned in its entirety and evincing the claim that this really was a city of a thousand trades. The reproductions are good enough to render every detail of the plates visible, so that little is left to the imagination of the grim sweat and toil pervading the plate of serried ranks of file grinders in Hepinstal & Parker’s File Manufactory. Yet, there are lighter moments. An advert from Aris’s Birmingham Gazette for 26 July 1790 exhorts locals to attend the visit of ‘Mr BURNS, the surprising Ventriloquist’ whose ‘Faculty of speaking inwardly, without moving his Lips, Tongue, &c and the Voice seemed to proceed from every other Quarter of the Room’. Try also finding Robert Mynors’ grisly work on trepanning the skull, itself perhaps only slightly more frightening than the sweat shop conditions represented by Bisset or the poetic soliloquy of Hannah Moore’s black slave forced to watch her child burn. Indeed, it is possible to follow many of these ideas thematically through the site selecting and dropping resources as appropriate. Overall, this can be used as a huge digital warehouse from which to plunder images, as a monument to human endeavour, or as a testament to the dignity of labour set against the grim reality of impoverished workers upon whose broken backs the wealth of a pontificating meritocracy was created.

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