Robert Bage’s Hermsprong as a Historical Document
Kevin P. Dugan
Social Studies Department
Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School
Bethpage, NY
NEH Seminar 2006
Background
Robert Bage (1728-1801) lived and worked in and around Birmingham and Tamworth in
the English Midlands, where he witnessed (and participated in) a series of exciting
economic, political, and cultural trends in English history. He owned and operated a
paper mill at Elford in Staffordshire, and he was always intellectually curious and an avid
reader. Bage visited Birmingham regularly, where he engaged in informal study and
forged friendships with well-known figures such as Lunar Society members Erasmus
Darwin and John Whitehurst. After an entrepreneurial iron works project operating in
Wycher collapsed around 1782, and as his paper works faced continuing financial
pressures (Perkins 15-16), he took up fiction writing, hoping that a supplementary career
would distract him from financial anxieties (Hutton qtd. in Perkins 343). He is classified
as a Jacobin novelist by most literary scholars (“Bage’s Books” 1) and published a total
of six books.
The English papermaking industry was on the cusp of major change during this
final, literary phase of Bage’s career. In 1800 papermaking was still performed by hand,
but a French innovation that used an endless wire cloth and a continuous felt blanket
would be installed in Hertfordshire in 1803 (“History of Papermaking” 1), and a rapid
series of patents and innovations and would follow, so that by 1809 the forerunners to the
modern cylinder mould and vat machine were developed, and steam-heated drying
cylinders would be in use by 1821 (“History of Papermaking” 1).
Complex trends in the agricultural, manufacturing, commercial, and demographic
domains, many of which are framed in different ways by different historians,
reverberated through the Midlands and beyond in the late eighteenth century, and Bage
developed strong opinions about the state of English society. He seems to assume a
middle class female audience for his novels, and aims to introduce radical ideas of French
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philosophes and Mary Wollstonecraft to his readers in the guise of light, if subversive,
entertainment. But, just as interestingly, secondary plot developments allude to trends
that interest historians of the Industrial Revolution. The novel is, of course, imaginative
literature, and not a straightforward, declarative historical document. But Hermsprong
helps the historian make sense of a radical, tradesman writer’s perspective on the early
Industrial Revolution.
The hero of the novel is a mysterious and compelling figure named
Hermsprong, who was raised with Native Americans in what is now Michigan and,
consistent with Rousseau’s principles, is thus is more attractive and virtuous than English
men. He values friendship, forthrightness, generosity, and romantic love, and feels
strongly about the harmful effects of hierarchy, nobility and hereditary privilege,
conventional gender roles and patriarchy, rarefied etiquette, commercialism, and the
influence of the Church of England. He travels throughout Europe by foot, with only one
servant, and acts as a problem-solver whenever he can, often by dispensing money or
consoling or befriending the unfortunate in a more or less chivalric way. Toward the end
of the novel the reader learns his true identity: Hermsprong is the rightful heir to the
aristocratic seat of Grondale, near Cornwall. His father was cheated of his title and
fortune by a scheming, gambling, depraved, gout-ridden younger brother who now sits in
the House of Lords, exploits his servants, tenants, and family members, and unjustly
dominates the region with the aid of an arrogant magistrate-vicar, Dr. Blick. Hermsprong
aims to eject the dishonest Lord Grondale and, through legal means, recover his title. But
matters are complicated when Hermsprong falls in love with his uncle’s daughter.
Hermsprong frequently speaks with his cousin, Caroline Campinet, her ebullient, troublemaker friend Charlotte Fluent and the narrator, Greg Glen about the natural equality of
men and women and the mentally distorting effects of English tastes, gender and family
structures.
Bage’s characterization of the aristocratic villain is rich, effective, and
entertaining. The description of Lord Grondale’s physical characteristics, sexual
improprieties, egotism, betrayals, and his intention to forcibly marry his daughter,
Caroline to an ugly aristocratic misfit are designed to outrage the reader. But the tone of
the novel is light and upbeat, and while catastrophes nearly strike many characters, they
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are almost always averted. In fact, in the penultimate chapter, the villain himself, as he
lay dying of a stroke at home, seeks the forgiveness of his daughter and Hermsprong.
With this resolution to the novel’s conflict, Bage implies in a discussion in the final
chapter, Hermsprong’s region of Cornwall is set to enter a kind of utopian golden age,
where tolerance and the rule of law will be the order of the day and unjust social
hierarchy reduced, albeit within a framework that acknowledges property rights and
Hermsprong’s preeminent social position.
The novel advances a utopian vision of a simpler, more natural society. Bage thus
shares, or anticipates, an interest of Robert Southey, who published his Colloquies on the
Progress and Prospects of Society thirty-four years after Bage finished Hermsprong. Both
men are troubled by the new, commercialized English market economy, and both see a
new avariciousness developing alongside technological and productive gains. The hero of
the novel is aware of England’s urbanization and technological gains, but in an argument
that anticipates Southey’s concerns, wonders about the net effects of the emerging
economic order.
You have built cities, no doubt, and filled them with improvement, if magnificence be
improvement; and of poverty also, if poverty be improvement. But our question, my
friend, is happiness, comparative happiness… It should seem… that nature in her more
simplemodes, is unable to furnish a rich European with a due portion of pleasurable
sensations. He is obliged to have recourse to masses of inert matter, which he causes to
be converted into a million of forms, far the greatest part solely to feed that incurable
craving known by the name of variety (Bage 158-159).
Bage here seems to acknowledge the demand-driven source of England’s manufacturing
momentum in the eighteenth century, just as Berg does in the Age of Manufactures, and,
like Southey, he sees consumerism as alienating. In addition, both Southey and Bage
express disapproval for the dismal science of economics (Bage 219), characterizing
Malthus as in error, and favor the promotion of emigration as a policy that is in the public
interest. Bage glorifies North America as a nobler, morally healthy environment, just as
Southey ponders the advantages of settling in Latin America. The emigration issue is
raised explicitly in the novel when Grondale’s attorney, Corrow, files a series of false or
dubious charges against Hermsprong, including illegal advocacy for emigration. Bage
and Southey thus share some common principles. But while Southey viewed the French
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Revolution as a dangerous and misguided enterprise (even though he supported it
initially), Bage takes a different view.
Hermsprong is more or less sympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution,
and, given the geopolitical climate when it was published in 1796, placed Bage in
potentially dangerous opposition with an ascendant reactionary political movement. His
letters, as discussed by Perkins in the 2002 reprint of Hermsprong and, separately, in a
brief obituary of Bage, written by his friend and principal paper customer, William
Hutton in The Monthly Magazine in 1802, make it clear that Bage and his Birmingham
milieu were traumatized by the anti-French (and anti-Dissenter) Birmingham Priestley
Riots of 1791 (qtd. in Perkins 342-343). In the novel, the unlikable, elitist and selfserving Anglican minister Dr. Blick makes direct reference to the 1791 Birmingham
attacks that affected Bage and his friend Hutton. Bage has Blick sound foolish as he
slams dissenters, the idea of natural rights, and the value of tolerance in a sermon (164).
Bage, Hutton, and their radical friends would have also been disturbed by the
prosecution of speakers from the reformist London Corresponding Society in
Birmingham in 1796 (Perkins 10). Bage himself, in his papers now at the Birmingham
Library and discussed by Perkins, claims that the tax authorities harassed him for his
political beliefs, even after he was cleared at a hearing (Perkins 13-17).
Several historians, including the Hammonds in The Town Labourer, have argued
that a proper analysis of economic and political trends during the early phases of the
English Industrial Revolution cannot be conducted without considering the French
Revolution, Britain’s wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and the British
state’s concomitant taxation and bond policies. According to the Hammonds, the newer
entrepreneurial class and the older landholding classes collaborated in politics and
oppressed (in unison) the new wage earning classes, in part out of fear of a popular
proletarian insurrection inspired by the French Revolution.
The classes that possessed authority in the State and the classes that had acquired the
new wealth, landlords, churchmen, judges, manufacturers, one and all understood by
government the protection of society from the fate that had overtaken the privileged
classes in France (320).
The Hammonds, while they allow for exceptional elite figures who advocated for the
working classes, see a class conflict underway during Bage’s lifetime, and the power of
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the pre-reform state was usually deployed against the wage earners. Bage himself seems
to deploy a class formulation similar to that used by the Hammonds. The narrator of the
novel, Hermsprong’s friend, Greg Glen, recounts Lord Grondale’s reaction to a letter
from the titled and wealthy Henrietta Chestrum, in which Chestrum lays out her family’s
pedigree and wealth, and suggests that her son marry Grondale’s daughter, Caroline.
There was something in this letter, which a plain man of common sense and excitable
lungs might have laughed at; but to the noble sentiments of the noble lord to whom it was
addressed, it was perfectly congenial. I understand that in this island of Great Britain, at
the time I am now writing, birth is the first virtue, and money the second; some indeed
may dispute the precedence; but all will allow that one or both aresine qua nons, without
which virtue is not (227).
Here the novel explicitly (and critically) addresses class. Bage’s fiction, while
entertaining, was at the same time radical and anti-establishment. The political agenda of
Hermsprong thus placed Bage in direct opposition to the business and landholding elites
of his day. The novel’s treatment of two legal figures, the magistrate Dr. Blick and
Grondale’s attorney, Corrow, resemble the Hammonds’ treatment of abusive local
magistrates. Both the Hammonds and Bage take note of the way local judicial
proceedings can deviate from common law principles in favor of the maintenance of elite
privilege. In one section, Corrow considers what tactics he could use to spuriously
convict Hermsprong.
Mr. Corrow had a prodigious respect for Lord Grondale, and for money; and would
have done for one, or both of them, any thing or every thing that the law, in all its
latitudes, would have enabled him to do. To press down to the earth, and under it, a
poor man, is easy; it is the work of every day; but to make a man, with money in his
purse, guilty of crimes he never committed, requires a superior fund of knowledge
(Bage 226)…
The novel’s treatment of elite manipulation of the local legal system anticipates the
Hammonds’ discussions of unjust magistrates like Colonel Fletcher of Bolton
(Hammonds 65) and the Vicar of Chudleigh (Hammonds 72). In fact, the Hammonds’
discussion of the latter figure bears a striking similarity to Bage’s Corrow in that both
legal actors sought to prosecute their targets on the basis of possession of Thomas Paine
books which Bage would probably endorse.
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Bage deals directly with the issue of French radicalism in Hermsprong, and we
see, for example, Hermsprong declining to criticize the French Revolution when baited
by other characters. The hero of the novel is later accused by Lord Grondale and his legal
agent, Corrow, of being a French agent. Hermsprong’s powers of verbal persuasion, and
the professionalism of the magistrates other than Dr. Blick, yield an outcome of not guilty
on that charge (and the others, too). Here Bage’s social vision appears to diverge from the
Hammonds’, but only slightly. While unsavory characters like Corrow and Blick,
corrupted and eager to please Grondale, aim to manipulate the English legal system, they
are repeatedly rebuffed by Hermsprong, and the system overcomes the attempts to
manipulate it. The Hammonds, having analyzed relevant Home Office papers, convey a
sense of local legal dysfunctionality in The Town Labourer. But both Bage and the
Hammonds seem to agree that the poor working people generally do not prevail in the
legal system when their interests are at variance with those who are wealthy.
Bage’s unfriendly and satirical treatment of Lord Grondale, Dr. Blick, and Sir
Philip Chestrum, the ugly, mean-spirited, ridiculously class-conscious failed suitor to
Caroline Campinet, are the most obvious devices used by Bage to challenge the dominant
political discourse. While the novel does not assign much attention to exploitative,
entrepreneurial characters, we know that Lord Grondale accumulates capital from the
mining operations on his lands, that he collects rents and government bond interest
payments, and repeatedly attempts to manipulate the courts. His behavior, then, is
consistent with the Hammonds’ framework, and Grondale’s financial portfolio takes into
account the new commercial economy, which Bage dislikes. Manufacturers and
businessmen do appear in the novel, but only in the background. Bage does not develop
these characters or direct at them the kind of venom reserved for the older, landholding
elite class, with their legal and Church lackeys. A textile magnate, for example,
successfully courts the attractive Miss Brown early in the novel, and the widowed Mrs.
Garnet, who is rescued from loneliness and poverty by Hermsprong, was married to a
failed merchant who died en route to the West Indies to rebuild his failed business. A
French textile magnate, Rupre, does receive negative attention in the novel, as he seeks to
stop the marriage of his daughter and Hermsprong’s father by placing her in a convent
and then, after the marriage, refuses to communicate with her. This sub-plot parallels the
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more central, despicable treatment of Caroline Campinet by Lord Grondale and
reinforces the novel’s emphasis on gender and the value of romantic love.
Given Bage’s background, one might not expect him to pursue an antiestablishment literary agenda. He associated, after all, with some of Birmingham’s
premiere businessmen. But Hobsbawm puts forward a class framework for the early
English Industrial Revolution that allows for the performance of subversive advocacy
work by someone, like Bage, who employs workers, owns property, and associates with
men like William Hutton, Erasmus Darwin, and John Whitehurst.
An important group had even accepted, indeed welcomed industry, science and
progress (though not capitalism). These were the ‘artisans’ or ‘mechanics’, the men
of skill, expertise, independence and education, who saw no great distinction
between themselves and those of similar standing who chose to become
entrepreneurs, or to remain yeoman farmers or small shopkeepers: the body of men
who overlapped the frontiers between working and middle classes. The ‘artisans’
were the natural leaders of ideology and organization among the labouring poor, the
pioneers of Radicalism (and later the early, Owenite versions of Socialism), of
discussion and popular higher education… And a variety of clubs, societies and freethinking printers and publishers… (68).
Hobsbawm, like the Hammonds, develops a framework of class exploitation and the
extraction of capital from the workers who create it. Industry and Empire takes note of a
class of men who are betwixt and between two social worlds, with conflicting loyalties.
Bage’s biographical profile matches Hobsbawm’s model, and he clearly pursues a
populist tone in his letters and many of his novels (Kelly 1). Hermsprong, however,
would probably disappoint Marxists as a revolutionary document, since it never directly
tackles questions about the means of production or labor specialization, fails to advance
anything like a national or broad-based program for change, and instead seems to imply,
optimistically, that England’s social ills and faults can be resolved at the local and
interpersonal levels, outside the political stage. When the characters engage in conceptual
reasoning, they discuss some ideas associated with Wollstonecraft, Voltaire, and
Rousseau. Family and individual conduct and ethics, not institutional ones, dominate the
more intellectual dialogues in the novel.
While elite figures are at the center of the plot, wage earners and other workers do
appear, and their portrayals are worth noting. Early in the novel, the narrator, Greg Glen,
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explains that his mother was a cottager who was seduced by a local lawyer and died in
childbirth (Bage 59). Here Bage, however briefly, addresses rural social conditions in the
late eighteenth century and alludes to the distressed marginal (and landless) classes who
lost access to common pastures during the Enclosure Movement. Later, in Grondale, near
Cornwall, a terrible storm strikes, and several buildings are damaged or destroyed. There
are even some fatalities. Hermsprong’s love interest, Caroline Campinet, describes the
hero’s reaction to the crisis to Dr. Blick.
Here is a gentleman has been amongst the cottagers, ever since the dawn of day. All
the labourers are at work to repair their respective damages. He promises their usual
pay to all, and a gratuity over to those he finds most industrious. In the mean time, the
butcher is stripped of meat (Bage 136)…
Here the rural poor appear as the victims of a natural disaster, and they are mobilized by a
generous, rational leader. The workers are faceless, but diligent and responsible, and their
conduct was determined by the influence Hermsprong exerted over them. Throughout the
novel Hermsprong succeeds at gaining the support of ordinary people in a way that Lord
Grondale and Dr. Blick cannot.
Perhaps the most interesting example of Hermsprong’s interaction with working
men occurs later, when a mining strike takes place within the boundaries of Lord
Grondale’s properties. The mineral they extracted is not identified, but eighteenth century
Cornwall ranked among the world’s biggest producers of copper and tin (Jowell 1) and,
in Bage’s lifetime, Newcomen’s atmospheric (or ‘beam’) engines—symbols of modernity
and technological innovation-- dotted Cornwall, where they were used to pump water
from mines (“Mine Steam Engines, Cornwall” 1). The more efficient Watt-type engines
were just beginning to appear at the time the novel was published (“Mine Steam Engines,
Cornwall” 1). The novel cites “dearness of provisions” as the trigger for the labor action
(Bage 307), and Perkins, in her annotations to the novel, discusses the food riots and
shortages in 1795 as a likely inspiration for the fictional incident (Perkins 307). The
crowds of rioting miners were growing by the day and they threatened violence against
the exploitative classes. Their critics in the establishment suspected support from France.
They were coming to pull down all lord’s houses, especially Lord Grondales’s; for
he was a miner; had gotten rich by the sweat of their brows, and for any good he had
ever done, they never heard of it (Bage 307).
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Another crisis rocks the community, and again a paternalistic Hermsprong dramatically
springs into action. The reader learns what happens through the testimony, at trial, of a
“junior justice of the bench” who observed events and presented Hermsprong in a
favorable light. The junior justice appeared before the miners, directing them to disperse.
But then Hermsprong addressed the workers.
My friends, perhaps it may be that your wages are not adequate to the furnishing you
with all the superfluities of life which you may desire; but these are unhappy times, and
require of you a greater degree of frugality and forbearance. My friends, we cannot all be
rich; there is no possible equality of property which can last a day. If you were capable of
desiring it, which I hope you are not, you must wade through such scenes of guilt and
horror to obtain it, as you would tremble to think of. You must finish the horrid conflict
by destroying each other. And why should you desire it? The rich have luxurious tastes
and disease; if you have poverty, you have health (Bage 314).
But before Hermsprong finishes, he was interrupted by a miner who asked the mysterious
hero who he was and accused him of being a “royal spy.” Hermsprong punches the man
in the head, but then apologizes and offers a half crown as a de-escalation gesture. He
explained that he was bothered by the insinuation that the king should not be respected,
but the punch appeared to raise Hermsprong’s standing among the miners. Hersmprong
then sets up a sort of relief fund, delegating to a man in the audience the power to
disseminate funds from a bag of silver as a means of covering essential food costs for
miners unable to feed their families. The hero resolves the crisis, and the recounting of
events at trial boosted Hermsprong’s standing vis-à-vis the panel of magistrates.
The mining strike incident raises interesting questions about Bage’s political ideas
and could lead one to question the argument that he identified with working people. The
miners are depicted as blustery brutes who can listen and come close to appreciating a
reasonable argument, but need additional nudges like the spectacle of a public punch or
the offer of money to behave maturely. Many modern readers are likely to find the
miners’ logic—“that others had gotten rich by the sweat of their brows”-- sounder than
the hero’s assertion that poverty is ennobling and healthier than affluence. It appears that
Bage is using the incident as a vehicle for exploring Rousseau’s ideas about the state of
nature with his assumed middle class female audience. The treatment of the incident is
not subversive at all, and seems to support the maintenance of property rights, even
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during famines. Still, Bage seems to imply that it is unreasonable to assume that the labor
actions of his lifetime (and, more broadly, participation in combinations or unions) are
always tied to a French fifth column. Bage also conveys a sense that working people
could, conceivably, receive wages that would not cover bread costs, as Tilly and Scott
document, and he may have thought that would be a revelation to his assumed audience.
No women appear in this scene of the novel, even though Tilly and Scott sketch a model
for bread riots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that emphasizes
female leadership (Tilly and Scott 55-56).
Most plot development occurs in Grondale’s section of Cornwall, and it is
interesting to compare and contrast Bage’s description of events there with Charles
Dickens’ depiction of 1854 Coketown in Hard Times. Dickens’ Coketown is,
economically, more advanced than Bage’s own protoindustrialized Birmingham, and
even more so, the fictitious, mostly agricultural and mining section of Cornwall in
Hermsprong. The division of labor would be more elaborate and rational by the midnineteenth century, and the organization of workshops and factories would be much more
regimented and more closely supervised by the capitalist investor or his hired managers.
According to Berg, the toy manufacturing sector that drove Birmingham’s growth during
Bage’s lifetime was varied, dynamic, technologically innovative, and favored mediumsized workshops with a wide range of organizing structures, all interfacing with an
elaborate web of factors, merchants, county dealers, and shopkeepers (Berg 288-305). On
the other hand, the Dickensian Coketown, like the historical Manchester of Dickens’ day,
makes much fuller use of coal-fueled steam power than the metals manufacturing and
other workshops of Bage’s late eighteenth century Birmingham, and the labor force was
fully proletarianized. The scale of the factories was much larger than the metals
workshops of 1790, and women and children were deployed differently.
Coketown, as described by Dickens, was a dark, depressing, dehumanizing place,
especially for the working poor, but also the two children of the relatively affluent
Thomas Gradgrind. Gradgrind’s rigid, cold-hearted devotion to liberal economic and
technocratic utilitarian thought and Bounderby’s emphasis on a dishonest and warped
theory of self-reliance and social mobility are both exposed as fallacious. Dickens’
Stephen Blackpool declares the social and economic system of Coketown a real
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“muddle,” and the novel presents an essentially nihilistic vision of life in the new factory
cities.
The setting for Hermsprong is also socially warped, in part by deleterious factors
such as commercialism, classism, outmoded gender concepts, and unjust customs. But a
single character, Lord Grondale, embodies the worst of the vices that trouble Bage,
controls the means of production, and seeks to dominate local affairs. His function is
similar to Bounderby’s; both hegemons believe strongly in their superiority and are
mocked by the novelists who create them. But Bounderby is a replaceable cog in the
capitalist system, while Grondale’s ejection from the political and economic system,
Bage seems to think, could yield a just outcome.
Interestingly, the two rich men’s relationships with their respective domestic
managers, namely Bounderby’s Mrs. Sparsit and Grondale’s Mrs. Stone, are rich and
complex. In both cases the employed woman understands her employer better than
anyone else and sets the tone for the home until a falling out occurs. Curious
psychological (and in the Grondale-Stone relationship, physical) intimacies and conflicts
occur. The two pairs of couples constitute a type of family unit, as sketched by Tilly and
Scott, although in both cases they collapse. In the case of Sparsit, her privileged family
background provides Bounderby with an oddly pleasurable touch of social sophistication,
while the illicit sexual nature of the Grondale-Stone relationship is grotesquely
hypocritical, given Grondale’s conservatism and pretensions of superiority.
Dickens does create an analogue to the Rousseauean Hermsprong in Sissy Jupe.
Like Hermsprong, she is refreshingly free of oppressive customs and inhumane ways of
thinking. In Hermsprong’s case, outmoded customs and hierarchies are frustrating, and he
works toward pulverizing them at the local level. Sissy, too, does not identify with the
dominant ideology, although in her case she is steering clear of a new set of ideas—
utilitarianism—and not the holdovers of the medieval past. But Sissy does not take any
political action, and limits her efforts to acts of kindness within the Gradgrind household.
Her mode of leadership, if one can call it that, is quiet and unlikely to change the system,
while Hermsprong’s actions are politically disruptive, at least in Cornwall.
Both novels paint a picture of dysfunctional socioeconomic systems. Dickens
declares Coketown a muddle and rejects religion, laissez-faire economics, utilitarianism,
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trade unions, and political reform. Hermsprong, on the other hand, is more optimistic.
True, the culture and economy have perverse elements, but heroes like the charismatic,
romantic Hermsprong, through the powers of reason and persuasion and the effective use
of money, can expose the defects of the current system and introduce a more just order.
The likes of Grondale can be humilated and weakened, as occurs when the court system
finds against him, in spite of his hereditary privileges. For Bage, Enlightenment
principles, including reason, can provide solutions to social injustice.
Works Cited
Bage, Robert and Perkins, Pamela, ed. Hermsprong. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview,
2002.
Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
British Association of Paper Historians. “History of Papermaking in the United
Kingdom.” British Association of Paper Historians Website.
[http://www.baph.org.uk/general%20reference/history_of_papermaking_in_the_u
nited%20kingdom.htm, accessed August 12, 2006]
Cornwall Calling. “Mine Steam Engines, Cornwall.” Cornwall Calling (Tourist Website.)
[http://www.cornwall-calling.co.uk/mines/steam-engines-mines.htm, accessed
July 24, 2006]
Dickens, Charles and Spector, Robert David, ed. Hard Times. New York: Bantam, 1981.
Hammond, J.L. and Hammond, Barbara. The Town Labourer: 1760-1832, The New
Civilization. London: Longmans, 1917.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. New York:
New Press, 1999.
Jowell, Tessa. “Mining Landscape of Cornwall and West Devon Becomes a UNESCO
World Heritage Site.” London: Ministry of Culture, 2006.
[http://www.chymor.com/worldheritage.htm, accessed August 3, 2006]
Kelly, Gary. “Bage, Robert (1728?–1801)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1028, accessed July 24, 2006]
13
Revolutionary Players Project. “Bage’s Books,” Revolutionary Players,
[http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/home.stm (“People” section), accessed
August 3, 2006].
Revolutionary Players Project. “Practical Utopias: the Writings of Robert Bage.”
Revolutionary Players. [http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/home.stm
(“People” section), accessed August 3, 2006].
Revolutionary Players Project. “A Biography of Robert Bage.” Revolutionary Players.
[http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/home.stm (“People” section) accessed
August 3, 2006].
Tilly, Louise and Scott, Joan. Women, Work, and Family. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1978.
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RELEVANT IMAGES
A first edition of Bage’s Hermsprong (1796).
Antiquarian Booksellers of America at http://www.abaa.org/cgi-bin/abaa/abaapages/index.html
15
Bage’s home—the Millhouse at Elford-- as it appears now.
Photograph by John Goss.
From Revolutionary Players at http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/people.stm
16
Watercolor by T. Fornet, from Buckland Churchyard.
A Dover paper mill at Buckland, 1799. This mill operated at the same time as Bage’s.
British Association of Paper Historians, http://www.baph.org.uk/imagepages/quarterly/q49p23.htm
Also available at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g.hatfield1/pic1770.htm
17
A papermaker at work.
Papermaker, The Book of Trades or Library of Useful Arts, Part III, third edition (London
Tabart and Co, 1806).
From Revolutionary Players at http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/people.stm