Britain and the US had clearly urbanised by the turn of the twentieth century, and towns and cities continued to grow into the interwar decades. It is generally accepted that landscape, culture, politics and daily life was consequently transformed – and that cities were both ‘exemplars of a changing order and also engines for the creation of that order’. Until now, however, the question of the specifically urban aspects of citizenship have been somewhat underplayed. Cities were getting bigger, more numerous and setting the agenda in terms of politics and governance, yet questions of belonging and civic identity, the prevailing historiography suggests, were supposedly becoming less important or apparent by the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter outlines, explains and critiques this seeming paradox, and offers an alternative: that the city still had an important role to play in the theories and practices of citizenship right into the 1930s.

To achieve this rethinking I take a long perspective. I begin by tracing how historians have emphasised the political and legal definitions of citizenship. Britain and the US experienced similar developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shaped the articulation and response to societal questions: the creation of a mass electorate, changing fortunes in global power, the growth of the state and internal challenges to the social and political order. I then turn to the place of the ‘shock city’, and the urban more broadly, in late nineteenth-century understandings of citizenship. Reacting against urban degeneration in the industrial city, and fearing the decline of society and national power, civic reformers and municipal governments increasingly intervened to shape a better (if still hierarchical) local community. Rather than following historians who have seen the decline of urban solutions in the interwar period, however, I emphasise continuity. Progressivism may have faltered in the US by 1920, British cities might have continued to lose civic leaders to the suburbs, and political debate and practice did partially move to the national in both countries. But cities were still, nevertheless, conceptualised as a key site of community building. This opinion is tracked across a range of thinkers on urban life in the 1920s and 1930s. Urban critique, in comparison to the often-shrill denunciations and predictions of the 1880s and 1890s, now softened.

If we are to understand the place of sacred music in the post-secular West we need to know a little about its place in history and what ideas and values we have inherited. In order to do that, we need to begin in ancient Greece.

Our ‘ancestral’ heritage of musical theological thought can be divided into two, overlapping, categories or narratives through history. Firstly, the Pythagorean tradition, which is closely allied to ‘disclosive’ modes of musical significance (that is, where God is disclosed to us through the cosmological, rational, material nature of the universe) and the Orphic tradition, which is more akin to ‘affective’ modes of significance (that carry us outside of ourselves, change our attitude or lead us to contemplation or a new state of being).

The Greek mathematician Pythagoras (sixth century BC) and his notion of the harmony of the spheres was based upon his observations of the mathematical purities of musical ratios. Therefore his view was that the divine is disclosed through the created order and is, as Begbie puts it, essentially ‘rational’; it is a reflection of the cosmic harmony. The disclosive tradition continued with Plato (427–347 BC), for whom ‘Music gives us not only a model of harmonious balance, unity, and integrity, it actually implants cosmic harmony into the soul of humans.’ Plato's views were essentially dichotic or dualist, dividing the material from the ideal, the temporal from the eternal. But Plato also stood within the Orphic tradition, where music has the power to affect human emotions and soul. It could enhance virtue and it could be a ‘means to correct any discord that may have arisen in the courses of the soul … our ally in bringing it into harmony and agreement with herself’. Listening attentively, therefore, was of crucial importance, for ‘heard music for Plato has a positive ethical, political, and social potential’.

The overlapping, metaphorical relationship between text and textile is overt in the Old English and Latin literatures of Anglo-Saxon England, and one metaphor that capitalizes on such a connection is poet or author as “wordweaver.” One hypothesis to explain the metaphor—or rather, cluster of metaphors—in Old English literature is that Anglo-Saxon peoples were aware of the visual and etymological relationship in Latin between words for weaving and writing or composing. That they were clearly influenced by Latin examples of such metaphors is indubitable, and I will examine the metaphor's transmission, and indeed genealogy, through a series of classical and late Latin texts known to have inspired Anglo-Latin texts, the latter of which have a fascinating inter-genealogy of their own. But to consider the connection solely through the lens of Latin source study forecloses other important possibilities. A more significant question is why such a metaphor would resonate sufficiently to take on a rich life of its own in Old English as well as Anglo-Latin literature; indeed, why such a metaphor or group of metaphors would be used to describe not solely Latin composition, but also Old English poetic techniques. Interrogating the resonance of text/textile metaphor allows for far more complex lines of enquiry. What elements of the material culture of textiles among the Anglo-Saxons would make a “wordweaving” metaphor comprehensible and attractive to its authors? What aspects of the composition of Old English poetry would make an original or a translated metaphor seem apt? What characteristics of stylized Anglo-Latin writing—from riddles to saints’ lives and passages of exegesis—would render the metaphor apt for those among the same specialized population of writers working in Anglo-Latin? Building on prior and present research, I will attempt to trace these patterns and relationships across the metaphors of “wordweaving” in the literatures of Anglo-Saxon England.

LATIN WORDPLAY: TEXERE, TEXTUM, AND ORDIOR

Textual-textile metaphors are embedded in the Latin lexicon inherited by the Anglo-Saxons, or at least, by the small but significant portion of the Anglo-Saxon population that was textually as well as orally literate, or perhaps literary.

Fleetwood fleeces the company – a cartel is formed and the Lord Chamberlain falls in – the players protest but Fleetwood's ‘Estimate’ prevails – Garrick, Macklin, and ‘Kitty Cuckoe’ part ways – Clive meets De Fesch – Rich abuses, Clive protests; Garrick abuses, Macklin protests – audiences fire Fleetwood

In 1743 Clive was caught up in the second actors’ revolt of her career, but this time her involvement damaged her reputation irreparably. After the Licensing Act of 1737 had closed all but the two royal playhouses, the ensuing duopoly was a temptation to form a cartel that Charles Fleetwood and John Rich did not resist. Fleetwood also stole from the Drury Lane payroll to cover his gambling debts, and the unpaid actors walked out. David Garrick and Charles Macklin headed one rebel faction, Clive another. The players’ only recourse was to the Lord Chamberlain, who had the power to allow players to act outside either licensed playhouse. The Lord Chamberlain, presented with strong evidence of Fleetwood's malfeasance and petitioned by the actors for protection, sided with Fleetwood, whose story was that the exorbitant salaries of his principals had caused a modest deficit at Drury Lane, and that players were public servants who should know their place. Garrick and Macklin then turned enemies, each blaming the other in the press for spearheading the rebellion and betraying his fellows. Macklin lambasted Garrick for returning unilaterally to Drury Lane; Garrick defended this move as a means to help other rebel players return.

Clive fought her image war differently, downplaying her involvement at every opportunity. As in the 1736 Polly Row, she described herself as a victim of managers, now joined in a cartel to exploit players. She was the first of the rebel leaders to publicly charge Fleetwood with lying about their high salaries, her own especially, which she appears to have anticipated could lose audience sympathy for their cause. On the Garrick–Macklin conflict Clive was silent, refusing either to side openly with Macklin, or to return to Drury Lane with Garrick. Instead she took a breakaway group to Covent Garden. Outside the regular Covent Garden season, she led brief runs of masques and oratorios by Willem De Fesch.

[Inside Front Cover]

BEETHOVEN [presumably in his apartment in Mödling, making an errand list for a trip back to Vienna; ca. June 2]: June, 1820. [//]

[Friedrich] Starke. [//]

OLIVA [presumably in Vienna, while Beethoven was on a shopping trip there; ca. Saturday, June 3]: 1 kr. The larger cost a Groschen for a pair.

[Blatt 1r]

BEETHOVEN [in Mödling, making a shopping list with errands and general musings; on, or possibly across several days before, Wednesday, June 7]:

Straw [mats] on the tablecloth.

Device on which to lay knife and fork. Boots.

Shoes.

At Lind’s.

For the servants.

For yourself, 2 pairs of nankeen [Nanking] pants and a house vest.

—for Karl, too— Nightstool.

Portable writing desk.

[Blatt 1v]

Sugar, 1 pound.

Vests, 5 white.

Modezeitung [Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode].

Housekeeper.

[Blatt 2r]

At the woman fish-seller’s,

or to Wolf,

concerning the old servant.

Hat.

Shoemaker, who worked for me in Vienna, or take one on Stephansplatz. [Blatt 2v]

Or 2 white pairs of pants.

Bernard: deliver Blöchlinger's letters and the ones from here.

Bach: to ask concerning [Blatt 3r] the edition of my Collected Works.

Alter the garters.

[Blatt 3v]

2 mousetraps.

Pillowcases.

Concerning the letters from Brentano.

[Blatt 4r]

Talk with [lawyer] Bach. //

They have not attached the testimonial of Smetana, the lowlife fellows. [Blatt 4v]

In general, [write] a new report to the Court Chancellery.

Why didn't the Court of Appeals advance my right to the guardianship? [Blatt 5r]

Testimonial of Dr. Hasenöhrl, and of Smetana.

Coffee machine.

The man cannot concern himself.

Have the knife sharpened in the City.

[Blatt 5v]

How was it that the letters were sent open and still cost 6 kr.?

Can Frau [Johanna] Beethoven take back half of the pension?

[Blatt 6r]

UNKNOWN WOMAN [Mödling; no later than Wednesday, June 7]: This man cannot drive every day; he is a butcher. [//]

My husband is coming tomorrow; he will speak with him. Today he went to Edenburg to buy oxen. [//]

Until/by Friday [June 9]. [//]

My godmother has died. [//]

[Blatt 6v]

The middle of the fourteenth century saw the arrival in Europe of a cataclysmic pandemic known forever as the Black Death, during which great swathes of the population were scythed down by the Grim Reaper. Those huddled together in squalid prisons in crowded towns were especially susceptible. They could even be exploited, as the example of Bedford shows. When the Black Death reached there on 23 May 1349, the mayor, Henry Arnold, summoned Johanne Warderare, the keeper of the town gaol, and told him that as he had ‘three sturdy vagrants in custody to die betimes at Gallows Corner, and four prisoners awaiting trial for felony before the Court of Pleas’, he should tell them that they should have ‘life and liberty’ if they agreed to ‘drive the death cart at the stated hours and dig a great pit in Bury Field and stand by to bury the dead’. They had nothing to lose, and they found ready employment as the town was devastated.

London in particular was an ideal setting for the spread of disease. Many people living in close proximity in cramped, filthy dwellings in cramped, filthy streets meant that every household was prey to fleas and vermin, and the transmission of infection from person to person was easy. While palaces and priories were not exempt, London prisons were incubators of disease. Newgate and Ludgate were situated near London's great open sewer, the ditch that ran by the Fleet prison. It was ten feet wide and deep enough to carry a boat laden with a tun of wine, but it was so choked with the effluence of eleven latrines and three sewers that no water from the river Fleet could flow around it. Smelly sludge, deep enough to drown in, surrounded the unhappy inmates.