{"id":909,"date":"2016-06-28T08:51:55","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T08:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/?p=909"},"modified":"2016-08-12T10:27:14","modified_gmt":"2016-08-12T10:27:14","slug":"a-time-of-judgment-23-24-june-2016-conference-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/2016\/06\/28\/a-time-of-judgment-23-24-june-2016-conference-report\/","title":{"rendered":"A Time of Judgment (23-24 June 2016): Conference Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judgment everywhere. Implacable judgment in scarlet up in the Central Criminal Court or delivered in measured tones in the High Court of Chancery. Beside the Embankment in the imperial senate, judgment confidently uttered before the witnesses in committee chambers or mumbled amid the gilded crockets of a stifling House of Lords. Judgment by the bearded and caped men of the hanging committee, sat before the stacked canvasses at Burlington House. Judgment dropping glibly from the pen nib of the nameless gentleman of the press. Judgment in the eyes of the pedestrian, taught to read character in the faces and costume of his fellow foot passengers. Thundering judgment, delivered from a wrathful pulpit. Judgment in the small halls and lecture rooms of gas-lit institutes. Judgment accumulating, sweeping, failing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

So Charles Dickens did not begin Bleak House<\/em> (1852-1853) in that way \u2026 \u00a0but the international conference ‘A Time of Judgment: The Operation and Representation of Judgement in Nineteenth-Century Cultures,’<\/strong> held at Plymouth 23 \u2013 24 June 2016, examined the ways in which judgment was everywhere<\/em> in the nineteenth century: with all sorts of judgment operating and being represented in Britain, the British empire, across the Atlantic, and in continental Europe.<\/p>\n

Organized by Kim Stevenson<\/a> (Law); Annika Bautz<\/a> (English), James Gregory<\/a> and Daniel Grey<\/a> (History), the conference brought together literary scholars, legal historians, cultural historians and others. It drew upon poetry, photography, painting, performance, prose and printing technology itself, to examine judgment.<\/p>\n

The event began, suitably enough, on that \u2018day of judgment\u2019 on Britain\u2019s relationship with the European Union. And while the conference papers presented, did not study the realm of judgment in electoral politics, delegates otherwise studied a very broad range of judgments and judgements.<\/p>\n

For the figure of the judge and the acts of judging \u2013 whether explicitly worded in discourse to evoke ideas of the \u2018men of the law\u2019 or not \u2013 have not been studied sufficiently by historians of the nineteenth century, outside the specialisms of legal history or histories of literary and art criticism.<\/p>\n

This conference brought these aspects together \u2013 the legal and the non-legal, and examined the ways in which divine, legal, aesthetic and scholarly judgments were represented or operated from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The geographical coverage ranged from the local (South West) to the Antipodean.<\/p>\n

Judgement (with its additional \u2018e\u2019) was particularly important, with papers on the portrayal of judges in photography (by Professor Leslie Moran<\/a>, the second keynote speaker, using the mass-produced small photographs or cartes de visites<\/em> of judicial celebrities), in the popular British illustrated press, and Australian painting. There were judges in divorce courts, in affiliation trials and in trials for child murder.<\/p>\n

Public justice was studied through the perspective of the \u2018court\u2019 of public opinion in Britain and the United States, and in early nineteenth-century police courts in London. A panel explored Plymouth as a case study in provincial legal judgements, taking in police discipline, provincial press verdicts, and other voices of authority in the Three Towns.<\/p>\n

There was judgment on sexuality and mental state. There was judgment in the aftermath of vengeful violence or intemperate behaviour due to alcohol. There was judgment in relation to aesthetics: with work presented on the relationship between taste and judgment in British stage adaptations of Walter Scott, in the field of British art criticism, and in gentlemen\u2019s collecting practices.<\/p>\n

Judgment in theology was approached through the figures of William Blake\u2019s Urizen in his unpublished Four Zoas<\/em>, and the \u2018scourge of God\u2019 motif in the poetry of Lord Byron, and through the place of judgement in the moral universe of Victorian secularists.<\/p>\n

That all-important sphere for judgment, in scientific cultures, was reflected in the keynote paper by Professor David Amigoni<\/a>, on the dispute between Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler (remember now as the author of Erewhon<\/em> and The Way of All Flesh<\/em>).<\/p>\n

The international and national institutes for passing judgment in science, the organs and procedures for judging scientific truths, is an important aspect of the nineteenth-century \u2018time of judgement\u2019. The \u2018pseudo sciences\u2019 might also have been considered \u2013 since phrenologists developed their own theories about the faculties of judgment, but delegates also heard one paper exploring that commonplace mode of judging character \u2013 handwriting \u00a0\u2013 through graphology.<\/p>\n

The judgment of mass readerships, the exercise of moral judgment by the masses and the inculcation in an exercise of judgment by working-class men and women through the agency of mechanics\u2019 institutes, the judgment exercised via popular prize competitions, were topics presented.<\/p>\n

But there is also the judgment of \u2018the market\u2019, and judgment related to business misconduct and economic failings \u2013 also themes highlighted in the conference through the figure of debtors (in novels by Frances Burney of the late eighteenth-century), the social reportage of Henry Mayhew\u2019s London Labour and the London Poor<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Judgment is a universal practice: we are all expected to exercise our moral judgment and, regretfully, we all make quotidian judgments about people on the basis of such externalities as physical appearance. It\u2019s easy to be critical of the harsh legal or social judgments of the past \u2013 to lambast the Victorians, for instance, for their \u2018judgmentalism\u2019.<\/p>\n

Rather than passing judgment on the nineteenth-century, this conference presented and interrogated the varieties of judgment in action and representation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judgment everywhere. Implacable judgment in scarlet up in the Central Criminal Court or delivered in measured tones in the High Court of Chancery. Beside the Embankment in the imperial senate, judgment confidently uttered before the witnesses in committee chambers or mumbled amid the gilded crockets of a stifling House of Lords. Judgment by the bearded… Continue reading A Time of Judgment (23-24 June 2016): Conference Report<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,137],"tags":[292,294,25,296,348,143,33,291,295,293,345,297,346,347],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dossier","category-histories-memory-memorialisation","tag-19th-century","tag-annika-bautz","tag-conference","tag-daniel-grey","tag-david-amigoni","tag-english","tag-history","tag-humanities","tag-james-gregory","tag-judgement","tag-judgment","tag-kim-stevenson","tag-law","tag-leslie-moran","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1110,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions\/1110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}