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Political Engines: The Emotional Politics of Bells in Eighteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2020

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Abstract

This article asks how and why bells maintained their central place in political culture between 1660 and 1832, a question that can best be approached from the perspective of histories of the emotions and senses. Such a consideration of bells allows us to extend the concept of “emotives” to encompass material culture. Often believed to “speak,” bells were fundamental to a binary emotional regime: the joy and sorrow they expressed and created were essential to perceptions of deference, community, and national feeling. But they could also be inverted and used a form of resistance. For those outside the religious or political status quo, bells could instantiate forms of emotional suffering. Tracing the “listening public” of which bells were part demonstrates the importance of the freedom to hear in the eighteenth-century public sphere. In this context, the ascription of material and emotional agency to bells was a useful rhetorical tool. Its deployment in newspaper reports of ringing, which served to encourage certain ways of listening, points to the importance of both text and sound in creating a “listening public.” But this listening public was also marked by forms of emotional suffering and exclusion that trouble the place of practices of celebration in any nascent “English” or “British” identity.

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Journal of British Studies , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , July 2020, pp. 555 - 581
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2020

In 1681, during the Bristol election, a band of bell ringers was fined for a riot in the belfry of St. Mary le Port. When the minister refused to give up the key to the church so that the men could ring in support of their candidate, they picked the locks and barricaded themselves inside the belfry. The magistrates ordered them to open the door, but “the rabble only lookt down and laught at them for their pains.” In the end, the door was forced open and the ringers imprisoned until a fine was paid.Footnote 1 During the 1826 election at Retford 145 years later, a similar scene took place. It was a fraught contest; one candidate, Sir Henry Wright Wilson, had whipped up anti-popery feeling against the two other candidates, William Battie Wrightson and Sir Robert Lawrence Dundas, who had refused to oppose a Catholic relief bill. When Battie and Dundas visited Retford on 16 February 1826, the Hampshire Telegraph reported, “a contest took place between the opposite electioneering parties for the possession of the bells; the church was scaled by ladders, the belfry door broken open, and those who were ringing forced out. The vicar interfered, and a most atrocious riot, in defiance of the civil power, closed a scene never surpassed within the precincts of a place of religious worship.”Footnote 2

Conflicts over bells were not uncommon in the period between 1680 and 1832. Why, at the beginning and end of the long eighteenth century, did bells remain so politically important that they were worth fighting over? Current work on the auditory culture of eighteenth-century England fails to help answer this question. If there is a dominant emotional tenor in studies of soundscapes of this period, it is annoyance. A focus on the boundaries of the tolerable and intolerable has led to a concentration on an increasing sensitivity to noise, especially of an urban variety.Footnote 3 The emotional power of sound in eighteenth-century England, however, went far beyond causing annoyance. Bells offer a pertinent example. They were rung to celebrate, to mourn, and to make community felt.

Church bells dot the historiography of partisan politics, crowd actions, and religious conflict in eighteenth-century England. They appear in cases of Jacobite sedition in the 1720s, in celebrations of radical victories in the 1760s, and in food riots in the 1800s.Footnote 4 Yet despite pioneering work on the celebratory calendar of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historians of the eighteenth century have yet to explain why bells maintained such political power.Footnote 5 In this article I argue that an approach combining sensory history and the history of emotions can help to clarify the subject. The eighteenth century's political emotions have been sidelined by influential work that has sought to rationalize forms of political decision making and identity—for example, Linda Colley's assertion that the growth of a patriotic national identity in the period was “more an appeal to the mind that the emotions.”Footnote 6 While recent work has examined the passions of the American Revolution, historians of emotion have yet to engage with eighteenth-century English politics.Footnote 7

Ringing and listening to church bells were part of a series of practices of feeling that mobilized, communicated, and regulated the political emotions.Footnote 8 They therefore provide one response to a recent call for historians to trace the mobilization of emotions in the early modern period.Footnote 9 It was the emotive power of bells and their ability to communicate multiple, layered meanings to listeners that made them such a powerful political resource. Work on the eighteenth-century public sphere has frequently discussed the freedom to meet, to talk, to speak, and to share ideas.Footnote 10 Interpreting and responding to the sound of bells also made eighteenth-century individuals part of a listening public in which listening to sound, not just making it, was a political act.Footnote 11

Previous scholarship on sound has argued that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sounds provided a meaningful semiotic system in which urbanites located individual, communal, and corporate identities. By contrast, during the eighteenth century, visual codes—especially maps, newspapers, timetables, street signs, and house numbers—replaced the soundscape and relegated it to the status of meaningless noise.Footnote 12 This aural-to-visual narrative has built on a long-established “audio-visual litany” differentiating hearing and sight as opposites.Footnote 13 Undergirding this view is an ostensible hierarchy or ratio of the senses: the idea that as vision rises in importance, hearing or sound falls by the wayside.Footnote 14

Scholarship on orality and literacy has demonstrated that a simple transition from orality to textuality misrepresents the complex interrelationship between the two.Footnote 15 The relationship between the auditory and the visual has received less focus. Yet in the case of bell ringing, sound and print were deeply intertwined. One set of sources that extensively recorded bell ringing in the long eighteenth century is newspapers. Frequently their pages include advertisements for future ringing, recorded instances of bell ringing for posterity, and reported campanological conflicts. Newspaper reports of ringing demonstrate the way in which sound and text worked together: by publishing instances of ringing, national and local newspapers were widening the scope of a potential hearing public. The subtle shifts in these descriptions of ringing, previously dismissed as repetitive and formulaic, have much to tell us.Footnote 16 They are an example of the way in which print increased the resonance of public celebration and crowd actions by replaying them to readers.Footnote 17 Newspapers were implicated in managing practices of political listening. They attempted to stabilize the meanings of bells in the ears of readers by explaining why they had been rung or by adjudicating between auditors. Previous historical work on the political use of sound has stressed its ability to create and control communities through “affirmative resonance”—a “practice or event when a group of people communally create sounds that resonate in a space, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of their group and its identity patterns.”Footnote 18 Bells could be used in ways that marked the acoustic dominance of church and state. But we should not automatically assume the transparency and inescapability of that dominance. The resonance of bells with listeners was not always guaranteed.

I begin by describing the role of bells as emotives within the emotional regime of eighteenth-century English politics, centered on a binary of sorrow and joy. I then illustrate how discussions of ringing in newspapers created fictions of emotional authenticity, spontaneity, and representativeness. In the third section, I show that these constructions led to contests over how representative of the feelings of a community ringing was. The binary of joy and sorrow that bells invoked could often split along several lines. I then describe how this binary allowed for practices of inversion that could mark individual, group, or communal disapprobation for people, policies, or events. Bells were emotives that listeners could interpret in different ways, and often it was this variability that gave them their political power. Newspapers helped manage these practices of listening. In the last section I trace the impact of different forms of denominational loyalty on the emotive deployment of bells. I argue that the use of bells by church, state, and subjects attempted to control a soundscape that often caused emotional suffering for communities beyond the established church.

Ringing Joy and Sorrow

The long eighteenth century, from the Restoration to the Queen Caroline affair, was the apogee of political bell ringing. It was a moment when church bells proliferated. In the 1600s, around 350 new sets of bells were cast in England; during the 1700s, the comparable figure was 1,350, and during the 1800s, it was 1,200.Footnote 19 Between 1660 and 1820, a binarism of joy and sorrow constituted the emotional community of English political celebration. The associations of loud peals with joy and muffled peals or tolling with sorrow were the “norms of emotional expression” within that community.Footnote 20 By the end of the seventeenth century, a calendar had developed in which rejoicing was central. Communities drew from a shared list that included royal anniversaries such as birthdays, accessions, and coronations; deliveries from popery, including Gunpowder Treason and William III's landing at Torbay; customary celebrations such as May Day, Rogationtide, and New Year's Day; and the holidays marked in the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote 21 By 1700, Ronald Hutton has argued, a “silent majority” of parishes failed to ring on many major days of celebration. Yet this contention, based on extensive samples of parish accounts, assumes that ringers were always paid and that payment always came from the parish coffers.Footnote 22 With the rise of ringing societies and a tendency for individuals to pay ringers directly, these assumptions are difficult to sustain. The calendar of celebrations and the bell ringing that accompanied them survived, with many local variations and shifts in regularity, throughout the long eighteenth century.

In the late seventeenth century, a shift occurred from seeing celebration as a commemoration of the monarchy to understanding it as a progress report on the government.Footnote 23 This shift depended on an as-yet unobserved emotional regime in which both happiness and joy were implicated. At the Georgian court, the happiness of the royals and their retinue was perceived as a barometer of national health.Footnote 24 Documenting the happiness of subjects was more difficult, though it was the often-stated goal of eighteenth-century government,Footnote 25 and was frequently discussed in terms of wealth and population.Footnote 26 The feeling of happiness was conceived of as underlying, internal, and individual: “a state in which the desires are satisfied.” Joy, on the other hand, was demonstrative, communal, and often fleeting, “the passion produced by any happy accident.”Footnote 27 To make happiness visible, it had to be connected to joy.

In eighteenth-century texts, joy was described as adding to general happiness.Footnote 28 It was also be described as a sympathetic response to witnessing the happiness of others.Footnote 29 But joy and happiness were also temporally distinct. Joy was described as only “small happiness” that “shortly must expire”—“transient joy,” in contrast to “substantial happiness”Footnote 30 For a political example, one might compare the discursive effervescence of “joy” at the Restoration in 1660 with panegyrics on the current and future “happiness” promoted by England's commercial growth in the 1680s.Footnote 31 While happiness was an individual feeling, joy was something “diffused” to others.Footnote 32 Joy might be felt at the achievement of, or reflection on, longer lasting happiness.Footnote 33 The emotional regime of celebration built on the mutual causal interaction of joy and happiness: “With what joy and gratitude must every Englishman reflect on the happiness of his own nation.”Footnote 34 The act of bell ringing, especially at times of national celebration, was a means of inducing, demonstrating, and diffusing a joy at underlying happiness.

Within this regime, bell ringing was a key emotive that both expressed emotion and made it felt by auditors: “Bells generally stir, animate, and excite the feelings, and seem rather to fit them for active engagement.”Footnote 35 Emotives have been conceptualized as speech acts or bodily gestures: saying “I feel great joy” both expresses our joy and helps us feel joyful.Footnote 36 But objects can speak, and this was especially true for bells. Across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print culture, bells were described as having voices, and their clappers were often compared to tongues. The inscriptions on bells encouraged these associations. They spoke of their founders, those that had funded them, the quality of their sound, and the tasks to which they were put. Some examples:

At Proper Times my Voice Ile Raise

And Sound To My Subscribers’ Praise.Footnote 37

Altho I Am Both Light & Small

I will be Heard Above You All.Footnote 38

To honour both our God and King

Our voices shall in consort ring.Footnote 39

The difference between a bell and a voice was twofold. Firstly, a bell reached far beyond the hearing of speech, extending its emotive power: “by speaking they'l make all the Town to hear.”Footnote 40 Secondly, bells spoke on behalf of a community, not an individual. In the case of bells, we can extend the idea of the emotive to encompass material culture that speaks and understand emotives as a form of communal expression.

Fittingly, bells were understood during the eighteenth century as both a way of expressing feeling and creating it in in others. Bell ringing was an “expression” or “demonstration” of joy.Footnote 41 When news of Queen Caroline's acquittal reached Monmouth in November 1820, it “diffused a general joy, and the bells of the church confirmed the feeling of the inhabitants by merry peals, long and loud.”Footnote 42 The eighteenth century saw growing anxiety about the division between an inner self and outer identity, inner political belief and outward political action; bells helped allay these anxieties.Footnote 43 The joy they inspired was an outward and public demonstration that “praise sounds in the mouths and loyalty reigns in the hearts of all men of sense.”Footnote 44 But bells also created joy. Days of celebration were “ushered in with ringing of bells.”Footnote 45 Bells set the emotional tone of a day and inculcated the proper affective state in subjects. On news of a peace treaty with the United States in January 1815, “the ringing of the bells … essentially contributed to heighten the general joy.”Footnote 46 Subscribers for new bells at Norwich cathedral in 1774 praised peals for “adding to that joy which public and domestic occurrences frequently call upon them to celebrate.”Footnote 47 Church bells were described as “joy bells,” and resonating, sonorous, joy as “resounding.”Footnote 48

Ringing thus worked within a radial, material understanding of emotions: feelings were carried by objects, spaces, and bodies; they diffused outward, circulated around and flowed from them.Footnote 49 For eighteenth-century writers, the vibrations of sound were a good way of comprehending that, as a correspondent to the Universal Magazine noted in 1754, “all the passions, but especially those of the social kind, are contagious.” Individuals were, the article went on, “like certain musical instruments … set to each other, so that the vibrations or notes, excited in one, raise correspondent notes and vibrations in others … the joy, that vibrates in one, communicates itself to the other also.”Footnote 50

Bells both made feelings public and made public feelings. They could also express funereal sorrow, the opposite side of the affective binary of eighteenth-century politics. Joyful peals involved change ringing that used all the bells in the steeple. Ringers controlled the speed of ringing so that the bells would fall in shifting sequences each time they were rung. The result would be the sound of several bells ringing in quick, alternating succession. Tolling usually involved the slow ringing of a single bell, by the end of the eighteenth century often at intervals of as much as a minute. During the long eighteenth century, despite reformation assaults on funereal tolling, a short tolling of the bell was permitted after death, before the burial, and at the end of the funeral ceremony.Footnote 51 Full peals were rung to mark the funerals of major local or national figures. However, to mark sorrow instead of joy, the bells were muffled and rendered “dumb.”Footnote 52 This was done by wrapping cloth or leather around the clapper of the bell to create a “most doleful and mournful sound.”Footnote 53 From 1700 onward, a political culture of sensibility developed that valued the demonstration of shared, public, and physically affecting grief at moments of national sadness.Footnote 54 Dumb (or muffled) peals were the auditory element of this culture.

The relationship between sorrowful, muffled tolling and peals of joy was most apparent at the death of a monarch and the accession of a new one. National mourning quickly shifted to joy at the arrival of a new head of state. The swift change was satirized in a mock biblical “book of corruption,” printed in an 1831 election poll book: “The bells rang merrily and tolled mournfully; so that the grief was equal to the joy and the joy equal to the grief for twenty-one days.”Footnote 55 The mingling of joy and sorrow in alternate pealing and tolling, as in the case of the parallel death of Nelson and Victory at Trafalgar in 1805, could exert a powerful effect on listeners.Footnote 56 But authorities were aware of the potential hazards created by mixed emotional messages, and attempts were made to prevent them. After the death of George II in 1760, London's Court of Common Council agreed there should be no ringing of bells or other “outward shew of rejoicings” on the Lord Mayor's day: this would be “unseasonable” when the “whole nation” was “so sensibly afflicted with sorrow.”Footnote 57

It is difficult to track the affective responses of individuals to bells, but letters and diaries suggest that individuals did partake in the general joy and sorrow initiated by bell ringing. During 1759, a period of major British military victories, the essayist Catherine Talbot wrote that “nothing could be cheerfuller than … innumerable rings of bells.”Footnote 58 Not all auditors felt the same affections. In June 1815, Dorothy Wordsworth lamented that “joy of victory is indeed an awful thing, and I had no patience with the tinkling of our Ambleside bells.”Footnote 59 However, in newspaper reports the emotions that bells inculcated and expressed were frequently presumed to be the spontaneous, authentic response of the whole community.

Spontaneity and Deference

Newspaper reports of bell ringing depended on a fiction of emotional spontaneity and authentic deference. This fiction obscured the payment that ringers often received for their work and assumed a uniform emotional response from a community. The proliferation of bells in eighteenth-century England was partly the product of the rising popularity of change ringing.Footnote 60 Local ringing societies were part of the outburst of associational culture that characterized eighteenth-century England.Footnote 61 They competed to see who could ring the highest number of peals, with the least mistakes, in the shortest time—feats that were often reported and contested in newspapers.Footnote 62 During the eighteenth century a proliferating number of ringing societies, each with its own rules, fees, and rituals, were frequently employed to ring peals. The ringers were sometimes paid by the churchwardens, especially if they rang peals for summoning parishioners to services. But in the eighteenth century, they were frequently paid directly by those who wanted the bells rung.Footnote 63

Bells were rung at the request of particular individuals or groups, but “rich and poor alike can feel the influence of their power.”Footnote 64 Eighteenth-century England was a society in which the hum of electronic and automotive noise was still absent. The soundscape was populated by a wider range of frequencies that could be heard over a more extensive area. Records by eighteenth-century auditors suggested that the sound of bells could carry multiple miles into the countryside surrounding towns and villages.Footnote 65 The density of parish churches in urban conurbations meant that, if rung at the same time, bells could cover whole towns and cities with ease.Footnote 66 Bells were highly important as legible, meaningful, sensory impressions that could convey information and emotion.

But if the capacity to hear bells was widespread, the ability to set them ringing was more restricted. Readers might imagine from the many newspaper accounts that the English public sprang into acts of joyful deference at the slightest cause for celebration; the absence of mention of payment gave the ringing an air of emotional spontaneity. However, payment was usually expected, so that instances where ringers were reported to have performed “at their own expense” or from “spontaneous feeling” were unusual enough to be worth noting.Footnote 67 Such examples are notable for their rarity.

Bells were also instruments of deference, rung to celebrate the birthdays, coming of age, and even the mere local presence of aristocrats and other worthies as they traveled across the country.Footnote 68 Ringing was a “publick expression of respect” due to the monarch, politicians, and clergymen.Footnote 69 It was a demonstration of “satisfaction” by “grateful” subjects or tenants.Footnote 70 An excerpt from the West Briton, dated 25 January 1828, dramatizes this apparent spontaneity: “The following is a correct copy of a note sent last week by a farmer who resides not twenty miles from Liskeard, and who is the chief of the ringers of his parish, to a gentleman who was there on a visit of a few days: ‘The peppel of st c-r are verry appey to yer that mr d. is in st. c-r and in good ealth and the arr now giving him a pele.’”Footnote 71

But this deference was hardly organic, and it was usually paid for.Footnote 72 At the 1825 election, the three St. Alban's candidates spent more than £120 on ringing.Footnote 73 The bells themselves were also subsidized by and dedicated to local politicians, aristocrats, and members of the royal family.Footnote 74 One satirical letter from a member of Parliament complained that he had paid for new bells for his county town, which now “stun me with their noise.”Footnote 75 A ballad celebrated the 3rd Duke of Rutland in 1760 after he purchased a new bell for Baslow church. It would now “eccho from Rocks and Hills” and “publish the Fame of the Duke,” while his tenants would now “feel the kind Acts of his Will” in the sound of the bell.Footnote 76 The two sides of eighteenth-century society—on the one hand, polite, commercial, and socially mobile, on the other, conservative, deferential, and hierarchical—came together in ringing.Footnote 77 Bells spoke deference, but money made them talk.

Ignoring the payment behind ringing, newspapers simply reported that “the bells rang,” “rang merrily,” and “rang incessantly”—omitting the action of ringing altogether by imagining the bells as actants—or merely reported, “the bells were rung.”Footnote 78 The presence or entry of notable figures into a parish or town, including at elections, was “welcomed with ringing of bells,” and “saluted by ringing of bells,” or the bells were described as “ringing all the time of [the person] continuing in the town.”Footnote 79 Such phrases created an image not just of spontaneous emotion but also of spontaneous deference and approbation. The idea that bells were like voices, their clappers like wagging tongues, only helped further de-emphasize the pecuniary process behind their ringing.

Newspapers did occasionally raise questions about the emotional authenticity of ringing. After the silence of a local belfry on New Year's Eve, the Maidstone Journal lamented that “the ringers [do not] have national feelings on such occasions unless they are paid.”Footnote 80 Anxieties were frequently voiced about the “rapacity of ringers” who rang the bells “at the request of any one who may choose to give them 10s 6d to disturb the peace of the neighbourhood.”Footnote 81 Ringers were keen to establish patriotic passions as their main motivation. The ringers of Newport-Pagnell wrote to the Northampton Mercury in 1793 to make it “publicly known … that on every occasion that does honour to our king and country, we come forward as Britons, without any solicitation whatever.”Footnote 82

Worries about mercenary ringers were a symptom of the social imaginary in which bells were embedded. The eighteenth century witnessed a growing concern about the capacity of print and performance to communicate emotional authenticity.Footnote 83 The joy and sorrow that bells were said to express and to inculcate must be understood with these anxieties in mind. The late eighteenth century also witnessed the emergence of a slow privatization of urban public space and the commercialization of politics. In the name of improvement and good order, local civic elites increased their control of squares, parks, and marketplaces.Footnote 84 The letters to newspapers quoted above suggest that this commercialization and privatization could generate anxieties about the cheapening of political emotions. But overlooking the fact that ringers were paid for their duties, as most newspaper reports did, helped stabilize the image of bells as a transparent, spontaneous conduit for the political feeling of a community.

Community and Control

Bells marked the emotional boundaries of parish, corporate, and civic communities, their geographical limits, and moments of temporal opening and closure.Footnote 85 Joyful peals were rung to announce the beginning of elections,Footnote 86 the entry of candidates into towns,Footnote 87 and the announcement of results.Footnote 88 They indicated the opening of divisions in the community and the eventual reharmonization and “satisfaction” of interests at the end of the election.Footnote 89 Peals had civic significance; they proclaimed the appointment of officials,Footnote 90 the progress of processions,Footnote 91 and the entrance or departure of figures from the community.Footnote 92 Joyful peals summoned subjects to celebrations of locally significant legislation, legal victories, and new infrastructure.Footnote 93 By the late eighteenth century, subscribers from a town or parish often clubbed together on occasions of celebration to pay the ringers.Footnote 94 The joy or sorrow of bells expressed the satisfaction or otherwise of communities. The relative popularity of election candidates was associated with the sound or silence of bells.Footnote 95 In Middlesex in 1820, Mr. S. C. Whitbread was met with ringing, but at the appearance of his opponent, Mr. Mellish, “the bells were muffled and rung backwards.”Footnote 96 The reverse ringing, also used at moments of civic alarm such as fires or invasion, was marker of communal sorrow at Mellish's arrival.

The communities of feeling encouraged or represented by bells were national as well as local. Hearing bells on days of national celebration with a sense of joy made one part of the English national community. As the Gloucester Journal put it in 1817, “On all occasions of public joy, a good Englishman finds a peal of bells in unison with the best feelings of his heart. There is a purity, a cheerfulness, and a tender melancholy, even in their sound, peculiarly expressive of that pious gratitude which must always rejoice with trembling.”Footnote 97

The joy induced by bell ringing was made all the more important by its links to the emotional content of loyalty. Loyalty, especially from the 1740s onwards, was understood as a personal, emotional attachment to the monarch and nation, crafted through individual agency and feeling.Footnote 98 The reports of bell ringing (or chiming) for joy on days of national celebration in Ireland, and especially during the years of the Jacobite threat from Scotland, was a testament to the loyalty of Celtic subjects as well.Footnote 99

Joy at the sound of bells was part of the expected habitus nurtured by the loyal British subject. Inscriptions on bells declared, “Whilst thus we join in cheerful sound, / May love and Loyalty Abound.”Footnote 100 Joy was frequently deployed in public political debate. Claims about the goodness of policies or events were buttressed by claims about the joy that should be felt in the heart of every “good,” “true,” or “un-corrupt” “Englishman” or “Briton” at their coming to pass.Footnote 101 The power of bell ringing therefore depended on a series of expectations about the appropriate emotional response of a good “Englishman” or “Briton.” Conflicts over bell ringing centered on attempts to adjudicate the appropriate times, places, and occasions for the expression of joy. These conflicts over whose feelings came first were therefore about the content of citizenship itself and the proper emotional disposition of the British subject.Footnote 102 Claims about feeling and listening were therefore central to debate in the public sphere. It took more than agreement on norms of emotional expression—about joyful peals and sorrowful tolls—to constitute an emotional community.Footnote 103 Testing the boundaries of communities formed by emotion depended on seeking out agreements about what the proper objects of those expressions were.

The early eighteenth century saw hotheaded electoral contests between Tories and Whigs, high-church Anglicans, and their low-church opposition. Ringing was central to contests over the proper object of political rejoicing. Stories circulated of losing sides in elections removing the clappers and ropes of bells or hiding the keys to belfries.Footnote 104 Losing factions refused to countenance a communal expression of joy in which they could not partake. This defiance opened questions about who had the right to ring—communities, ringers, churchwardens and ministers, or representatives of government? The tensions were especially visible at two points. One was the popular celebrations surrounding John Wilkes's campaign against the government in the 1770s. At Wilkes's release from prison, bells were rung across the country, including rings of forty-five peals to match the number of the North Briton that had landed him with a libel charge.Footnote 105 Those opposed to Wilkes saw the event as a misuse of bells that insulted the monarch. One lamented, “When I heard bells ringing for King Wilkes's birth day, every peal sounded in my ears like the doleful clank of manacles and fetters.”Footnote 106 In some towns, politicians, churchwardens, and ministers attempted to prevent access to the belfry or silence ringing bells.Footnote 107

A second major conflict over the ability to control the political soundscape and its attendant emotion occurred during the Queen Caroline Affair. When the Bill of Pains and Penalties was dropped against Caroline in 1820, celebrations erupted across the country, accompanied by loud peals. Religious issues were central to the affair: whether George IV could divorce Caroline by parliamentary bill, whether her name should be contained in the Book of Common Prayer, and whether she should be crowned in Westminster Abbey. Ministers and churchwardens were vociferous in their condemnation of the ringing, which they construed as a misuse of church property. Bell ropes were removed, keys to belfries were withheld, and church doors were broken down by celebrants. Ministers ordered ringers to desistFootnote 108 and dismissed them and parish clerks who aided them.Footnote 109 Newspapers debated to whom the bells really belonged.Footnote 110 The question was soon resolved by resultant cases in the ecclesiastical courts. In 1821, Doctors Commons set a precedent for joint control of the bells by churchwarden and minister, which would lead to firmer clerical control of belfries.Footnote 111

This move failed to prevent further controversy. In 1821, John Ambrose Williams, a writer for the radical Durham Chronicle, was tried for libel after he accused Durham's cathedral and its six churches of failing to toll their bells for Queen Caroline's death. The prosecution defended the clergymen who were “not so loud in their grief, being, perhaps, the more sincere, and because their bells were not tolled, but suppressed their emotions.”Footnote 112 A rhetorical sleight of hand separated the agentive bells’ own emotions from those of the clergymen and equated sincerity with stoic silence. The cross-examination of witnesses made similar distinctions. They were asked whether the bells kept “to themselves” and “suppress[ed] their emotions,” or whether they acted “the hypocritical, or frank part.”Footnote 113 Here the defense used the rhetoric of agency in a different way. By ascribing to bells their own emotions and voices, the prosecution proposed that the clergy had actively silenced them. Material agency was a rhetoric used to make claims about the hidden politics of the soundscape. Bells were comprehended as an autonomous expression of communal feeling. But attempts to set and represent the emotional tone of the community were open to contestation along a whole series of political and religious lines.

Inversion and Resistance

Within the emotional regime of ringing, emotives could be turned to modes of resistance through practices of inversion. Bells were a cultural resource to be drawn upon and mobilized to invest different occasions with different feelings. While the emotives remained the same (the connection of peals to joy or dumb peals to sorrow), the objects of emotion may not have aligned with those prescribed by the emotional regime.Footnote 114 How individuals listened was crucial. Bells were public addresses to an indeterminate number of people, but they required active participation to function.Footnote 115 How individuals listened to these calls to feel varied.

One way of reappropriating bells was to ring them for joy on occasions that should not, according to the status quo, be joyful. This tactic was apparent in the use of bells by Jacobite sympathizers. For many Jacobites, days of joyful national celebration induced feelings of alarm, doom, and disgust. In Edinburgh in October 1699, when the king's safe return to England was celebrated, “that which fretted the Jacobites most was that the Musick-Bells were set to play an old Scotch Tune, call'd, Willie is welcome Home to me.”Footnote 116 Hearing the bells of London from Kennington Common in 1705, one Londoner saw a group of five Jacobites “walking after a most disconsolate manner” away from the sound and toward a set of gallows.Footnote 117 Hearing peals celebrate a Marlboroughian victory in 1704, a writer imagined a Jacobite wrapping “his Head in the Blankets, to keep the Noise of the Bells out of his Ears” but ending up “Dead of the Ding-Dongs.”Footnote 118 In some cases, Jacobites attempted to prevent the ringing. In Dundee in 1715, a crew of Jacobites invaded the bell chamber of the local church and stopped the bells from ringing for George I's accession.Footnote 119

One subversive response was to listen to ringing differently. The nonjuring Jacobite Thomas Hearne, a vehement opponent of the Hanoverian accession, listened to the bells of Oxford with musical and mathematical interest. His notebooks contain many entries on his listening, recording the numbers of errors in peals.Footnote 120 When Hearne listened to ringing on Hanoverian anniversaries, he heard disharmony. On George I's birthday in 1715, he observed the bells were “jambled” and their sound was “little taken notice of (unless by way of ridicule).” On the anniversary of George I's accession in August, Hearne noted that the bells were “only jambled, being pulled by a parcel of children and silly people … there was not so much as one good peal rung in Oxford.”Footnote 121 Hearne heard distasteful disorder in the bells of pro-Hanoverian ringers—he listened to them differently. His record of ringing was a form of composure, fitting the sounds of peals into a narrative and emotional order that made sense to him. Rather than assuming the affirmative resonances created by sound, Hearne's response suggests an ability to listen creatively in the face of acoustic dominance.Footnote 122

Jacobites returned the favor by joyfully ringing bells on days that celebrated the Pretender. Alarmed government supporters attempted to put a stop to it.Footnote 123 Peals at Leeds on the Pretender's birthday in 1715 produced a flurry of letters to newspapers debating who had ordered the bells to be rung and whether they were representative of the city's feelings.Footnote 124 In 1723, a churchwarden from Hambledon ended up in the consistory court for allowing ringing on the Pretender's birthday.Footnote 125 But the seditious nature of ringing was up for debate, because discerning the intention behind it was difficult. When Chesham in Buckinghamshire rang its bells on the Young Pretender's birthday in 1745, the Daily Advertiser described it as an “audacious act of impudence” that could not be “too severely punished.”Footnote 126 But one correspondent argued that, though the bells had rung, the population were not Jacobites in sentiment and their “stupidity” meant that they seemed “scarce capable of knowing one day from another.”Footnote 127

Sedition, sorrow, or joy were thus in the ears of the listener. A Stuart sympathizer who knew their Jacobite calendar might find joy in bells on the 10th of June, but for those who treated the day as a normal one like any other, the connection might not be made. At Bath in September 1715, a lady, offended that the bells had rung so vociferously for the arrival in the town of the Jacobite Sir William Windham, decided to play a trick: “She sent for the Ringers on the 18th at Night, and told them, if they wou'd ring an Hour she wou'd give ’em a Guinea. They accordingly went and rung a very good peal, and came back to the Lady, who told them that she had caused them to ring in Remembrance of King George's happy Arrival on that Day, and taking quiet possession of his kingdoms.”Footnote 128 The ringers were discomforted that they had created a joyful atmosphere on an anniversary they felt little joy in.

Ringing could be used as a form of political resistance in other ways. A dumb peal could be used to express sorrow at the actions of authorities. Unpopular members of Parliament were saluted with dumb peals or backward peals of alarm instead of respectful peals of joy as they passed through the towns within their constituency.Footnote 129 Dumb or muffled peals “insulted” defeated military and naval leaders on their return to England.Footnote 130 They demonstrated communal opposition to specific policies, especially taxes. When William Pitt introduced the Shop Tax in 1785, dumb peals rang out across the country. Their “dire toll” marked the “sinking” of the nation's trade.Footnote 131 Pitt's dinner at a London tavern was interrupted by dumb peals from the surrounding churches; the bells not only “tolled out the grievances of the people” but were also the “passing-bell of the popularity of the minister.”Footnote 132 The inhabitants of Southwark tolled a minute-bell for the mock funeral of an effigy of Pitt.Footnote 133 Dumb peals expressed the unhappiness of shop-owners and created an auditory atmosphere of public mourning.

Dumb peals could elicit debate in the newspapers. In 1763, the Peace of Paris ended the Seven Years War. Many Londoners had opposed the agreement, but despite the best efforts of Pitt and Beckford, Bute's peace was signed in February. The Court of the lord mayor and aldermen of the City of London marched in procession to St. James to provide an address, congratulating His Majesty on the peace. In response, in a clear statement of opposition, both St. Mary le Bow and St. Bride's rang a muffled peal as the procession passed.Footnote 134 Jeffereyes Hamett O'Neale's satirical print depicting the procession was accompanied by the lines “While Bow and St Bridget to show approbation / Have muffled their bells on this joyful Occasion.”Footnote 135 A letter to the London Chronicle asked, “Why were the bells of St Bride's muffled” when the procession went past? The Chronicle responded that those responsible obtained entrance to the belfry by “base and low impostion” [sic] upon the sextonness, who had not been aware of their intentions.Footnote 136 Another letter suggested that a gentleman had sent the parish officers a £20 banknote to be divided between the bell ringers if they rang the dumb peal.Footnote 137 A further letter asserted that the £20 was a charitable donation with no connection to the muffled peal.Footnote 138 A final letter on 14 May to the Gazeteer and London Daily Advertiser maintained St. Mary le Bow's dumb peal was “on account of the death of the sextoness of the parish,” and its occurring during the passing of the procession was merely coincidental.Footnote 139

A similarly problematic peal was sounded in November 1770. The General Evening Post reported that on the anniversary of John Wilkes's birthday, a dumb peal had been rung on the bells of St. Martins in the Fields. A furious group of Wilkes's supporters marched to the church, where they were told by a ringer, “Alas! Gentlemen, one of our best ringers died this morning, and we ring this peal in his memory.”Footnote 140 Dumb peals demonstrated how contested and fluid the meanings of bells were; their messages could be highly nuanced. At a Worcestershire parish in 1763, the bells were half muffled on Thanksgiving Day. The resulting half-dumb peal was “to express not only their joy, on account of the peace; but also their great sorrow and concern, at the late woeful TAX on Cyder.”Footnote 141 The complex, overlapping meanings of bells could generate miscommunication; the political offense caused by the dumb peal was formulated, in part, in the ears of the listener, often unconnected to the intentions of ringers or their paymasters. Newspapers were central to mediating these forms of listening by suggesting possible reasons for ringing and allowing auditors to respond—with joy or sorrow—to the sound.

A final approach was to refuse to ring the bells at all—to demonstrate a lack of joy or a refusal to impart it. This tactic was deployed by Jacobite sympathizers who refused to ring for Williamite or Hanoverian successes so that the bells were “obstinately dumb and spoke not.”Footnote 142 Bells could also be kept silent for more local reasons. In 1767 it was reported that the bells of St. Brides, Fleet Street, were never rung on the anniversary of the king's birthday, because two ringers had been tried and executed, despite a petition for clemency, in the reign of George I.Footnote 143 The refusal to ring became a mark of parochial contempt for a monarch who it was felt had failed in the performance of justice.Footnote 144 By the end of the period, there were occasions when ringers themselves, even with payment, declined or complained vociferously when asked to ring for politicians they disliked.Footnote 145 Silence bespoke a contemptuous refusal to rejoice.

Silencing or muffling bells, so that they were struck dumb or dumbly struck, was a deliberate infringement of the messages inscribed on them. Single-sheet prints and newspaper articles widely publicized the inscriptions on new bells; readers and listeners would therefore have been aware of bells’ anthropomorphic desire to “honour both our god and king”Footnote 146 or their call to “all, who hear me ring, / Be faithful to your God and king.”Footnote 147 Bells that failed to ring could thus be metaphorically “su'd for High Crimes” or “Impeach'd for Misdemeanours,”Footnote 148 or “drawn into petty-treason.”Footnote 149

Suffering

Silence could be a form of resistance, but it could also be a form of suffering that came with the inability to express joy. In 1732, the inhabitants of Ealing and Old Brentford wrote that they were “griev'd at heart, that they could not express their loyalty by ringing their bells on her majesty‘s birthday; their old decay'd church and steeple falling some years since.”Footnote 150 Yet for those outside the established church, suffering in silence was the norm. Bells marked the acoustic dominance of the Church of England, and dissenters, Methodists, and Catholics experienced the emotional regime the bells as emotional suffering.

Dissenters had little joy in the sound of bells. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenting chapels had a small bell in a cupola above the front entrance.Footnote 151 The use of this single bell to summon congregations was acceptable, “like the use of the Silver Trumpets” under biblical law.Footnote 152 Yet dissenters saw other forms of ringing as superstitious, and a distaste for ringing became a signifier of dissent. In 1707, a London churchwarden was accused of being a dissenter because he had argued that “hee Knew of noe occasion they had for bells to ring people to Church for ev[er]y body knew how to goe to Church at ten a Clock in the morning without bells.”Footnote 153 A failure to ring bells for moments of national celebration indicated a puritanical bent of mind. On the anniversary of Queen Anne's birthday in 1721, bells rang across the City of London, yet St. Mary le Bow remained silent. The ringers had been stopped, the Weekly Journal reported, “by a puritanical churchwarden in Cheapside, who very spitefully told them, that rather than suffer any ringing he would cut the ropes or break the bells.”Footnote 154

The use of bells in celebrating national victories and anniversaries encouraged dissenters, during a period when they were second-class citizens, to feel “that a Ring of Bells are fitter to be hung in a Market-place, than in a Church, because they are Political Engines, whose loud Tongues are often-times employ'd to proclaim Falsities.”Footnote 155 Dissenters were anxious to separate the religious and civil uses of bells. The death of a member of society was an “occurrence in which the community is interested” and therefore should be marked, but dissenters would rather “prefer the sounding of a bell fixed on the town hall, or in some part of each parish remote from the church,” to prevent superstitious associations.Footnote 156 The sound of church bells on days of national celebration was a loud reminder for dissenters of the imbrication of church and state that led to their exclusion from full rights of citizenship. Their distaste also derived from a differing attitude to joy. In contrast to the Anglican emphasis on corporate, public joy, dissenters emphasized the private discovery of joy that came through personal ordeals and inner battles.Footnote 157 In this context, bells did not have the same emotional value.

The right of non-Anglicans to use the bells of their local parish church was also contested. In the 1780s, the dissenters of Market Harborough had argued that by paying the church rates, they acquired the right to have the bell of the parish church tolled at their funerals. The answer of the churchwardens was that bells were only to be tolled for “the offices of the church” or at the discretion of the “minister and churchwardens.”Footnote 158 Some churchwardens, uncertain whether they had to ring the parish bell for dissenter funerals or not, sought advice from the church hierarchy.Footnote 159 By the 1830s, a belief circulated that dissenters did not disown bells out of choice but because they were forced to give them up by law.Footnote 160 This view resulted in further attempts by Anglican clergymen to prevent the tolling of bells at dissenter funerals. A speaker to a large meeting of the Protestant Society for the Protection of Religious Liberty in May 1825 lamented the emotional suffering caused by the “bigotry” of a clergyman who refused dissenters the “kindly” tolling of the bell, stopping it from lulling “as it vibrates on the ear … some of the sad, sad feelings which at such a moment rend and desolate the heart.”Footnote 161

The ostensible proscription on ringing for dissenter funerals did not stop non-Anglicans from using the sound of Anglican bells for their own purposes; their wide audibility made it difficult to control how others used them. Catholics had long been refused bells and steeples to underline the privacy in which they were forced to worship, but some Catholics used local parish bells to call them to their own meetings: in 1713, the staunch anti-Catholic clergyman Samuel Peploe was angered that Preston Catholics went “Publickly to their Meetings as we go to Church, and on Sabbath Days they go by our Bells.”Footnote 162 The ban on Catholic steeples did not go away in the late eighteenth century and was entrenched in the 1791 Catholic Relief Act.Footnote 163 When the Catholics of Edgton Bridge built their chapel in 1797, they added a turret nicknamed “the Pope's head,” but their provocation did not stretch to putting a bell in it.Footnote 164 Some instead used hand bells. The minister of Croxdale, Durham, complained about a Catholic chapel, “They often ring a hand-bell, at ye time of my congregations coming out of ye Chapel, as if in defiance.”Footnote 165 The attempt to prevent dissenters and Catholics from setting up bells or using those of the parish testified to a desire to control the religious soundscape.

The single bells used by dissenters could be the focus of attack by church-and-king mobs. In 1715, Manchester's Presbyterian meetinghouse was destroyed by rioters who “brought off the bell which they hung up in the pillory.”Footnote 166 Rioters thus presented a mock execution of the voice that summoned dissenters to worship, suggesting they were better summoned to the gallows than to their meetinghouse. Bells could also be used to make claims to public space and invade supposedly private gatherings. They were rung to drown out Methodist sermons and force preachers out of central urban public spaces and on to their peripheries. In 1743, George Whitefield was interrupted in Kidderminster by “some unkind men” who rang the nearby church bells throughout his discourse. In 1745, John Edwards's preaching was interrupted by “bells and horns,” made more audible when the mob broke the windows of the venue in which he was preaching.Footnote 167

Sound was crucial to the perception and practice of Methodism; two of its central traits were forceful preaching and enthusiastic hymn singing. Meetings, particularly the later revivalist meetings, could be noisy affairs.Footnote 168 Some believed that the government was unwilling to counter Methodism's subversive potential.Footnote 169 The attempts to drown preachers out were therefore a local way of opposing it. For Methodist preachers, there was triumph in overcoming these auditory assaults. In July 1756, when John Wesley preached in Pocklington in the East Riding, the “good churchwarden hired men to ring the bells” to drown him out, but “still the bulk of the congregation heard.”Footnote 170 This use of bells—big and small—sometimes overlapped with forms of rough music. Dissenters were chased to the edges of parish boundaries by mobs bearing musical instruments that evoked the sounds of church bells and hand bells in rogation-tide processions.Footnote 171 In this way, sound defined the boundaries of the parish and those who were not welcome within them.

Bells were also used to direct and assemble the mobs that attacked meetinghouses and Catholic chapels throughout the eighteenth century. Riots against dissenters in Newcastle-under-Lyme during 1715 commenced with ringing.Footnote 172 In the 1791 Priestley Riots, witnesses claimed to have seen the town crier, William Shuker, ringing his bell and shouting “Damn the Presbyterians, down with them, burn them.”Footnote 173 Ringing church bells again marked high-church control of the streets; after the acquittal of the high-church Anglican clergyman Henry Sacheverell in 1710, bells were rung in many towns, signifying that it was “not safe for any dissenter to appear in the streets.”Footnote 174 Sometimes the intent to create fear in dissenters’ hearts was made explicit. When two low-church election candidates arrived at Taunton in 1710, the high-church faction ordered “two passing bells to be rung, as if the two gentlemen had been dead.”Footnote 175

Ringing could be described as form of symbolic violence against dissenters. When Dr. Sacheverell visited Worcester in 1710, Whig magistrates stopped the bells of all the churches in the area from ringing by removing the bell ropes. In response, high-church mobs burst into steeples and chimed out their joy by using hammers. The bashing of the bells was a proxy for beating dissenters:

Compell'd to Non-Resistance
And Sovereign-Mob's Allegiance,
Prohibited Bells
Were bang'd into Peals,
And thump'd into Obedience.Footnote 176

Local church bells were used to organize Anti-Methodist and anti-Catholic mobs. In 1746, Wesley's arrival in Devizes was greeted by ringing the church bells backwards in a statement of alarm.Footnote 177 During the Gordon Riots, the mob removed the bell of Newgate Prison and used it to direct rioters.Footnote 178 A proclamation published in the wake of the riots advertised a reward for anybody who could identify those who had used bells to aid rioters.Footnote 179 This use of bells produced a climate in which the joy invested in bells by the dominant Anglican regime produced emotional suffering for other denominations.

This suffering was reinforced by vindictive, celebratory ringing when attempts to remove religious disabilities failed. In Derby in 1735, the failure of an attempt to repeal the corporation and test acts was greeted with orders for ringing in each of the parish churches.Footnote 180 After another failed attempt at repeal later in the eighteenth century, bells were rung across the country, and “especially where Dissenters lived,” more to “mortify dissenters, than to gratify” their high-church opponents.Footnote 181 Vindictive ringing was deployed against Methodists as well. In 1807, Methodists took up the case of a Methodist widow killed when the local lord of the manor intentionally destroyed her cottage with her inside it. When he was acquitted, “the Sapcote people nearly pulled the bells down in ringing” to spite the Methodists.Footnote 182

By the 1820s, the establishment were becoming aware of the possible resentment that ringing could cause among those who heard it differently. The newspaper response to the twists and turns of the Catholic relief bill are indicative of shifting attitudes. At the rejection of a Catholic relief bill in the House of Lords in May 1825, bells were rung across the country.Footnote 183 Not everyone who heard the ringing described it as harmonious. The Derby Reporter expressed indignation at church bells being rung for such an illiberal act, “as if some great victory were obtained over the enemies of the nation.”Footnote 184 In the House of Commons, Sir John Newport argued that in having “set the bells ringing as in triumph at the defeat of the Catholics,” the clergymen of England had been “ringing the death-knell of England” by making a large portion of its subjects “discontented with their government.”Footnote 185 This liberalism even extended to criticism of the Fifth of November celebrations. A letter to the Liverpool Mercury from a “Protestant against invidious observances” complained of twenty-four-hour ringing at his local church that memorialized the gunpowder treason. The annual ringing, a reminder that Catholics were treasonous fifth columnists, was a “dismal clangor of discord and strife” in the ears of all Christians that failed to “hush the turbulent passions into peace.”Footnote 186

Such complaints had little effect. When the Catholic relief bill finally passed, bells continued to voice communal opposition. In Leeds on the date of George IV's birth, “the bells were thrown so much ‘out of order’ by the passing of the roman catholic relief bill that they could not utter a sound.”Footnote 187 Bells continued to ring for gunpowder treason in many parts of the country well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 188

In the emotional regime that connected bells with joyful celebration or solemn melancholy, dissenters, Methodists, and Catholics were forced into forms of emotional suffering and divested of their place in the Anglican-dominated soundscape. They were prevented from ringing bells for the funerals of their coreligionists and were thereby less able to mark the appropriate emotional tenor of such occasions. But bells were also implicated in a politics of listening and hearing. Ringing drowned out the voices of Methodist preachers and its absence for dissenters and Catholics marked the privacy expected of those who worshiped outside of the state-sponsored church. Bells of joyful celebration encouraged fear and resentment among these men and women, a reminder of the disabilities they suffered. The emotional politics of bells therefore depended on the way one listened, on a set of expectations about who would listen with joy and who would hear with sorrow.

Conclusion

The political importance of ringing was not to last forever. From the 1820s onward, clergymen clamped down on access to steeples and asserted with renewed vigor their rights to restrict ringing. Clerical complaints suggest that by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, some parishioners were in fact ignorant of the meanings of church bells or uninterested in learning them.Footnote 189 By the 1830s and 1840s, ballads associated bell ringing not with urban or rural politics but with the quietude of an older, rural, merry England. Further ballads sardonically replaced the church bell with the factory bell.Footnote 190 Campanological cultures were changing. In 1846, the Post Office removed from service the postman's bell that had accompanied letter carriers since 1705. London's dustmen and muffin-boys lost their bells in the early 1840s. The town crier's bell became merely a ceremonial sound invoking images of an old England rather than serving a useful official purpose. Bells remained important to daily life well into the twentieth century, but the two decades between 1820 and 1840 were a point at which their uses and meanings significantly changed. The full story and character of this shift has yet to be revealed.Footnote 191

A study of the long eighteenth-century's political culture of listening has rich methodological implications. Much has been made of the affective potentialities of objects in histories of material culture and emotions.Footnote 192 With this article, I offer one possible way of integrating material objects into the theoretical frameworks deployed by historians of emotions. Bells had voices that both expressed and altered the emotional states of auditors. Bells were, in eighteenth-century culture, conceptualized in ways that match closely with the emotives described by William Reddy.Footnote 193 Bells’ tongues were comprehended as an extension of individuals and communities that both created and spread emotion in their reverberated peals. Bells give us one opportunity to examine objects that spoke not only in a metaphorical or theoretical sense but also in a way that was comprehended, discussed, and taken seriously by eighteenth-century subjects. Understanding material objects as emotional prostheses that supplemented and intensified emotional states offers a potent way of thinking about material culture and emotions. This is especially true in the eighteenth century, when objects were often configured as “supplements of the human.”Footnote 194

But bells also demonstrate the fact that material agency could be a useful rhetorical tool. When agency was displaced onto bells themselves, the roles of ringers and their paymasters were hidden, obscuring the pecuniary politics behind peals. This insight suggests a useful way for historians of emotions and things to frame their approach to agency: rather than only trying to understand the agency of objects, historians might better address how the rhetoric of agency and the anthropomorphizing of things have been deployed to underscore individual or communal identities and reinforce or obscure the workings of power.

The agency granted to bells also intensified the sense that they were authentic expressions of communal feeling. It is possible that eighteenth century understandings of bell ringing drew on an analogy with the concept of virtual representation. Just as the representatives of a smaller number of towns and counties legislated for the whole nation, the ringing of bells paid for by the few was held to represent the broader view of a town or parish to itself. This analogy seems stronger when we consider that bells were frequently rung (with joyful approbation or in sorrow or alarm) when members of Parliament or local grandees visited or left localities. Ringing or silence presented a report on the feelings of a community toward public figures.Footnote 195 A popular inscription on bells was “Tho’ much against us may be said, / To speak our minds we're not afraid.”Footnote 196 Bells, in their role as autonomous voices of communal feeling, could be invested with a form of masculine independence.Footnote 197 In a period when assessing the political feeling of English subjects was difficult but desirable, the role of bells in representing the joy enabled by an underlying state of happiness was important in building the legitimacy of the church and monarch in a climate when authority was not as expansive or effectively exercised.Footnote 198 Bells of joy were more than a theatrical and symbolic illusion used to pacify the minds of plebeians; they fashioned emotional atmospheres conducive to loyalty and reassured rulers and ruled that all was happy in “the ringing isle.”Footnote 199 If early modern political thought emphasized the importance of controlling the passions, bell ringing put this into practice.Footnote 200 Bells demonstrate the centrality of passions and their management to the politics of representation and legitimacy in eighteenth-century England.Footnote 201

Recent work on eighteenth-century political participation has cautioned against overemphasizing the accessibility of the English public sphere and stressed that the period saw a more mediated, vicarious experience of politics and governance.Footnote 202 The main interest of this work has been who got to speak. But when satirists responded to attacks on political freedoms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, they portrayed not only locked jaws but imprisoned ears.Footnote 203 Viewing the public sphere through the medium of listening, as a form of sensory access, offers us a new and different vantage point.Footnote 204 Bells were an address to the ears of a listening public that encouraged them to feel in particular ways. Fights in belfries and debates in newspapers demonstrated that listening and feeling were highly politicized acts. Attending to the loudest means of auditory communication in the eighteenth century (exclusive of cannons), gives a different spatiality to publicness, since the sound of bells could be heard across the parish, town, or city and into the countryside.

A plural understanding of a listening public helps to make sense of the early seventeenth-century proverb “As the fool thinketh, so the bell clinketh”: the tendency for listeners to interpret bells in the way they saw fit rather than the way prescribed by ringers or their paymasters.Footnote 205 That newspapers made claims about the joy that should be felt in ringing suggests that it could not always be taken for granted. The inversion and play produced in different uses of bells shows that their meanings were far from fixed and dependent on the individual's place, calendrical knowledge, and political disposition. Where some heard harmonious peals, others heard disorder. This should caution scholars working on the politics of sound to attend more closely to the politics of listening rather than presupposing the efficacy of acoustic domination. That newspapers played a role in stabilizing certain forms of political listening illustrates that the presumption of the triumph of the visual over annoying noise in eighteenth-century culture and communication should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Finally, listening and feeling were implicated in the politics of citizenship and national belonging. Linda Colley's description of the emergence of a British national identity forged in opposition to a Franco-Catholic other has received much criticism, including from scholars who have argued for a more inward-focused and incorporative model of identity formation.Footnote 206 The flexibility of bells as auditory signs and the politics of listening in which they were implicated suggest that we should be cautious in subscribing solely to either incorporating or othering forms of national identity. Certainly, bells rung in celebration of victories on the continent would have raised feelings of national pride in opposition to the superstitious campanological cosmology of Catholicism and, later, the widely reported melting down of bells by France's revolutionary armies. But they also encouraged feelings of alarm, distaste, or fear on the behalf of those outside of the Church of England, threatening a sense of national unity. Bells could remind listeners of their incorporation in the English (sometimes British) nation, but they were also a daily reminder for many subjects of their second-class place within it.

The conflicts over bell ringing I trace here illustrate how bells could be turned to oppositional uses and were themselves the focus of debate about appropriate forms of patriotic joy and sorrow. The affective atmospheres that bells generated could thus be as othering as they were incorporating. Supporters of the narrative of national identity through war frequently read celebrations on the surface, taking them as simple expressions of patriotism.Footnote 207 This would be to take the rhetoric of newspapers at face value. Attending to the complicated meanings behind these celebrations and their emotional content offers historians a picture in which the relationship between Englishness, Britishness, and otherness was frequently muddied by conflicting emotions and mishearings, intentional or otherwise.

This insight has contemporary implications. While recent calls have been made for a radical politics of collective joy, the response to eighteenth-century bell ringing should sound a cautious note against sentimentalizing the emotional content of festive cultures past. The deployment of ringing in support of the Church of England and in mockery of its enemies illustrates the propensity for collective rejoicing to shade into a vindictive schadenfreude.Footnote 208 This suggests that more work is needed on the emotional history of eighteenth-century politics. The binary of joy and sorrow in which bells were implicated is only one part of this history. Further work is needed to place bells within a far broader politics of the passions.

Footnotes

1 Observator in Dialogue (London), 26 April 1681.

2 Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 20 February 1826.

3 Cockayne, Emily, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (London, 2007); Garrioch, David, “Sounds of the City: The Soundscape of Early Modern European Towns,” Urban History 30, no. 1 (May 2003): 5–25; for a more nuanced approach, see Smith, Bruce R., The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999).

4 Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 28, 37, 52, 132, 137; Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1993), 35, 166, 169, 170, 173, 183, 212; John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832 (London, 2014), 129, 290; Robert Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth–Century England (London, 2004), 115.

5 David Cressy, “The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 29, no. 1 (January 1990): 31–52; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994).

6 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 371.

7 Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2009); Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2009).

8 This typology of emotional practices – mobilizing, communicating, and regulating – is drawn from Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220.

9 Joanna Innes and Michael J. Braddick, introduction to Suffering and Happiness in England, 1550–1850: Narratives and Representations. A Collection to Honour Paul Slack, ed. Michael J. Braddick and Joanna Innes (Oxford, 2017), 1–20, at 8.

10 The most interesting and relevant recent work includes Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2006) 48–62; John Barrell, “Coffee-House Politicians,” Journal of British Studies 43, no. 2 (2004): 206–32; Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2017), 7–8.

11 Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge, 2013), 7.

12 David Garrioch, “Sounds,” 24–25; for a similar shift in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998).

13 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, 2003), 15–16.

14 Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Sense in History and across Cultures (London, 1993), 1–3; David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor, 2003), 15; Alain Corbin, Time, Desire, and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (London, 1995), 182, 184, 191.

15 Adam Fox, Oral and Literature Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000); Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2017).

16 Bob Harris and Christopher Whatley, “‘To Solemnize His Majesty's Birthday’: New Perspectives on Loyalism in George II's Britain,” History 83, no. 271 (1998): 397–419.

17 Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), 353.

18 Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam, 2012), 34.

19 John C. Eisel and Cyril A. Wratten, Change Ringing: The History of an English Art, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century: An Overview (Morpeth, 1992), 38–39.

20 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006), 2.

21 For some lists of dates, see Cressy, “The Protestant Calendar,” 51–52.

22 Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 229, 260.

23 Hutton, 259.

24 Sally Holloway and Lucy Worsley, “‘Every Body Took Notice of the Scene of the Drawing Room’: Performing Emotions at the Early Georgian Court, 1714–60,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 3 (2017): 443–64, at 443–52.

25 Joanna Innes, “Happiness Contested: Happiness and Politics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Braddick and Innes, Suffering and Happiness in England, 87–110, at 102; Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York, 2006), 312–62.

26 Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), 139; Sara Lloyd, “‘The Wretch of To-day, May Be Happy To-morrow’: Poverty and Happiness in England c.1700–1840,” in Braddick and Innes, Suffering and Happiness in England, 190–207, at 194.

27 Samuel Johnson, s.v. “happiness,” “joy,” A dictionary of the English language, vol. 1 (London, 1755), 1009, 1182; Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge, 2007), 22.

28 Francis Hutcheson, An essay on the nature and conduct of the passions and affections […] (Glasgow, 1769), 50.

29 The history of Will Ramble, a libertine […], vol. 1 (London, 1755), 55; Jonas Hanway, Virtue in humble life […], vol. 2 (London, 1774), 670; Isaac Watts, The Doctrine of the Passions Explain'd and Improv'd […] (London, 1737), 88; William Wood, Sermons on social life (London, 1775), 107.

30 William Cowper, Poems, vol. 2 (London, 1786), 106; Edward Young, The complaint: or, night-thoughts on life, death, and immortality […] (London, 1802), 183.

31 On the Restoration, see Anthony Walker, God save the King: or Pious and loyal joy […] (London, 1660); Richard Baxter, Right rejoycing: or The nature and order of rational and warrantable joy […] (London, 1660); for the 1680s, see Paul Slack, “The Politics of Consumption and England's Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century,” English Historical Review 122, no. 497 (2007): 609–31, at 623.

32 A journal of first thoughts, observations, characters, and anecdotes, which occured in a journey from London to Scarborough in MDCCLXXIX (London, 1781), 58–59; Charles Churchill, An epistle to William Hogarth (London, 1763), 26.

33 Miss Stockdale, The effusions of the heart: Poems (London, 1798), 60; The Christian's magazine, or A treasury of divine knowledge 1, no. 1 (1767): 285–86; Colley Ciber, The careless husband (Dublin, [1704], 1793), 109.

34 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000), 43.

35 Alfred Gatty, The Bell: Its Origin, History, and Uses (Sheffield, 1848), 86–87.

36 Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49, no. 2 (2010): 237–65, at 243; Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester, 2018), 68–69; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), 331.

37 Inscription, first bell, St. Peter and St. Paul's, Alfred Cocks, The Church Bells of Buckinghamshire (London, 1897), 99.

38 Inscription, second bell, St. Mary, Luton; see T. North, Church Bells of Bedfordshire (London, 1883), 169.

39 Inscription, fifth bell, St. Margaret's, Lynn; see John L'Estrange, The Church Bells of Norfolk […] (Norwich, 1874), 158.

40 John Bunyan, A book for boys and girls; or, Country rhymes for children (London, 1686), 36.

41 English Currant (London), 14–19 December 1688; St. James's Evening Post, 19–22 November 1715; Reads Weekly Journal (London), 27 October 1733; General Evening Post (London), 5–8 February 1780.

42 Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet & Plymouth Journal, 18 November 1820.

43 For these anxieties, see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2004), 265–6; for their political implications, see Amelia Faye Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark, 2008), 87; Marilyn Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics (London, 2015), 8–9, 65.

44 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (London), 13 August 1720 (emphasis mine).

45 Similar phrases occur in Post Boy (London), 29 May–2 June 1697; Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, Saturday, 5 November 5, 1720; E. Johnson's British Gazette and Sunday Monitor (London), 31 May 1795; Derby Mercury, 27 April 1825.

46 Leeds Mercury, 7 January 1815 (emphasis mine).

47 Norfolk Chronicle, 24 December 1774.

48 John O'Keefe, The World in a Village: A Comedy in Five Acts […] (Dublin, 1794), 71; Edward Holland, A poetical miscellany (Cork, 1794), 72. Descriptions of joy as “resounding” occur most prominently in hymns and poems from the 1740s onward, influenced by the description of autumn's “Joy resounding Fields” in James Thomson, The Seasons (London, 1746), 152.

49 A less free-flowing understanding than that offered by other authors, who have failed to think through the metaphor of contagion and its wider place in eighteenth-century culture; for example Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, 1996), 3, 7.

50 “On the Social Duties of Man,” Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure [London], nos. 14–15 (1754), 266.

51 William Henry Pinnock, The Laws and Usages of the Church and Clergy (Cambridge, 1855), 496–97.

52 Berrow's Worcester Journal, 1 February 1761; Owen's Weekly Chronicle and Westminster Journal, 23–30 June 1770; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London), 24 May 1780; Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 9 September 1805.

53 C. M., Campanalogia Improved; or, The art of ringing made easy […] (London, 1733), 201–2.

54 Amy B. Oberlin, “‘Share with Me in My Grief and Affliction’: Royal Sorrow and Public Mourning in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Parergon 31, no. 2 (2014): 99–120; Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (London, 1999), 1–17.

55 The Norwich Election Budget (Norwich, 1831), 48.

56 Gatty, The Bell, 87–88.

57 London Chronicle, 4–6 November 1760.

58 “Catherine Talbot to Elizabeth Carter Nov 30th, 1759,” in A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from 1741 to 1770, vol. 2 (London, 1809), 304.

59 “Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson June 28, 1815,” The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 3, The Middle Years. Part 2, 1812–1820, 2nd. ed., Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1970), 242.

60 On the mathematics of change ringing, see Katherine Hunt, “The Art of Changes: Bell-Ringing, Anagrams, and the Culture of Combination in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48, no. 2 (2018): 387–412.

61 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), 48, 52, 72.

62 See Cyril A. Wratten and John C. Eisel, eds., Order and Disorder in the Eighteenth Century: Newspaper Extracts about Church Bells and Bellringing (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010).

63 See “Marshfield Company of Bell-Ringers, c.1808–1853,” P213/CW/4/1, Gloucestershire Archives; “Ringing Club General Register, Cirencester Ringing Club, c.1794–1850,” P86/1/SP/1/1, Gloucestershire Archives.

64 “The Merry Bells of England,” London, 1828, John Johnson Collection, Harding B 16 (148b), Bodleian Library, Oxford.

65 William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London, 1830), 201.

66 January 1752, trial of William Williams (t17520116-10), Old Bailey Papers Online; December 1762, trial of Joseph Derbin (t17621208-5), Old Bailey Papers Online; November 1808, trial of John Puplett Robert Brown, alias Briggs, (t18081126-5) Old Bailey Papers Online; May 1822, trial of James Butler (t18220522-79), Old Bailey Papers Online. For a sense of the density of bells in London, see Loftis Lawlar, An Alphabetical List of all the Parochial Churches in London and Westminster […] (London, 1722).

67 St. James's Evening Post, 3 March 1733; London Packet or New Lloyd's Evening Post, 10–12 September 1800; Liverpool Mercury, 1 December 1820.

68 For birthdays, see Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (London), 2 January 1720; Northampton Mercury, 27 December 1756; Morning Chronicle (London), 26 January 1805. For coming-of-age, see Daily Journal (London), 25 June 1725; London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 14 October 1740; York Herald, and General Advertiser, 3 September 1825. For presence in localities, see Post Boy (London), 25 July 1710–27 July 1710; London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 31 December 1760–2 January 1762; Morning Post (London), 5 October 1820.

69 London Gazette, 31 May–4 June 1683; London Evening Post, 12–14 September 14, 1765.

70 Morning Post and Gazetteer (London), 14 January 1800.

71 West Briton (Truro), 25 January 1828.

72 For some rare examples that mention this, see Weekly Journal, or, British Gazette (London), 15 June 1717; Northampton Mercury, 1 June 1741; Norwich Mercury, 20 August 1794; Morning Post (London), 29 August 1801.

73 Jackson's Oxford Journal, 31 December 1825; for further references, see “Disbursements etc. 1663–1689 and purchases,” PO3, fol. 42, Bedfordshire Archives; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), 30 June 1790.

74 Public Advertiser (London), 29 June 1790; St. James's Evening Post, 15 December 1724; T. North, Church Bells of Bedfordshire (1883), 138–39, 166–67.

75 B. D., letter to the editor, World (London), 19 June, 1755.

76 “Rutland's Bounty: or, Baslow Bells,” 1760, Roxburghe, 3.413, C.20.f.9.413, British Library.

77 Respectively represented by Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989); J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985).

78 Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 22–25 February 1755; London Evening Post, 3 June 1755; London Chronicle, 10–12 July 1760.

79 London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 31 December 1760; General Evening Post (London), 5–8 February 1780; London Evening Post, 18–21 August 1750.

80 Maidstone Journal, 2 January 1827.

81 Wakefield and Halifax Journal, 13 December 1816; Bury and Norwich Post, 28 June 1826; Bath Chronicle, 31 December 1795; Kentish Gazette, 29 January 1802.

82 Northampton Mercury, 17 August 1793.

83 Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian, “Emotional Light on Eighteenth-Century Print Culture,” in Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian (Basingstoke, 2016), 3–19, at 12.

84 Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1–6; Steve Poole, “‘Till Our Liberties Be Secure’: Popular Sovereignty and Public Space in Bristol, 1780–1850,” Urban History 26, no. 1 (1999): 40–54; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982).

85 For an earlier rural example of the role of bells in community formation, see Stephen Mileson, “Sound and Landscape,” in The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, ed. Christopher M. Gerrard and Alejandra Gutiérrez (Oxford, 2018), 713–27; Victor Morgan, “A Ceremonious Society: An Aspect of Institutional Power in Early Modern Norwich,” in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society, ed. Anne Goldgar and Robert Frost (Leiden, 2004), 133–63, at 148–51.

86 Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence, 25 February 1681; Morning Chronicle (London), 31 March 1825.

87 J. Noble and J. Clark, A Sketch of the Boston Election (Boston, 1830), ix, xii, xvi, xvii; Frank O'Gorman, “Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meanings of Elections in England, 1780–1860,” Past and Present, no. 135 (1992): 79–115, at 86, 95; London Evening Post, 24–27 May 1735; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 3 April 1780.

88 Post Boy (London), 19–22 August 1710; St. James's Chronicle, 7–9 March 1775; Morning Post (London), 17 March 1820.

89 Post Boy (London), 6–8 February 1701.

90 St. James's Chronicle, 1–3 February 1780; General Evening Post (London), 20–23 September 1735; London Evening Post, 19–22 January 1740; Public Advertiser (London), 10 January 1770.

91 London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 10 May 1740; Morning Post (London), 13 July 1815; Trewman's Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 13 July 1820.

92 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (London), 27 August 1720; Daily Journal (London), 7 October 1730; London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 31 December 1760; London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 27–29 April 1775; Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, 1 June 1805.

93 Daily Journal (London), 3 March 1725; London Evening Post, 22–25 November 1735; General Evening Post (London,) 22–24 November 1750; Public Ledger or The Daily Register of Commerce and Intelligence (London), 31 March 1760; General Evening Post (London), 12–15 February 1785; Examiner (London), 5 August 1810.

94 Owen's Weekly Chronicle and Westminster Journal, 23–30 June 1770; Lincoln, Rutland, and Stamford Mercury, 10 June 1803; Norfolk Chronicle, 21 August 1813.

95 Daily Gazetteer (London), 30 July 1735.

96 Morning Chronicle (London), 13 March 1820.

97 Gloucester Journal, 9 June 1817.

98 Matthew McCormack, “Rethinking ‘Loyalty’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2012): 407–21.

99 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 11–14 June 1715; change ringing failed to take hold in Scotland until later in the eighteenth century, partly due to the dimmer view taken of bells by the kirk. Instead the “musick bells” were chimed; General Evening Post (London), 9–12 November 1745.

100 Inscription, fifth Bell of St. Mary Islington, 1808; see John Nelson, The History, Topography, and Antiquities of the Parish of St Mary Islington (London, 1811), 311.

101 For examples, see William Dodd, An account of the rise, progress, and present state of the Magdalen Charity […] (London, 1763), 99; Benjamin Victor, Original letters, dramatic pieces, and poems, vol. 1 (London, 1776), 53; William Windham, A plan of discipline, composed for the use of the militia of the county of Norfolk (London, 1759), vii; John Wilkes, The life and political writings of John Wilkes (Birmingham, 1769), 339.

102 This builds on Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, 2004), 225.

103 Emotional communities are therefore about more than the agreed ways of feeling suggested by Rosenwein in Emotional Communities, 25.

104 Observator (London), 23–26 May 1705, 6–9 June 1705.

105 London Evening Post, 24–26 April 1770; On the significance of forty-five more generally, see John Brewer, “The Number 45: A Wilkite Political Symbol,” in England's Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763, ed. Stephen B. Baxter (London, 1983), 349–75; for further examples of Wilkesite ringing, see Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty, 5–8 May 1770; Public Advertiser (London), 2 May 1770; London Evening Post, 26–28 April 1770.

106 General Evening Post (London), 10–13 February 1770; for similar, see London Evening Post, 20–22 March 1770.

107 Independent Chronicle (London), 27–30 April 1770; Public Advertiser (London), 2 May 1770; Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty, 21–24 April 1770; London Evening Post, 21–24 April 1770; Jackson's Oxford Journal, 18 March 1769.

108 Bury and Norwich Post, 22 November 1820; Liverpool Mercury, 1 December 1820.

109 York Herald, and General Advertiser, 25 November 1820; Morning Chronicle (London), 11 December 1820.

110 Bristol Mercury, 27 November 1820, 23 December 1820; Examiner (London), 10 December 1820.

111 Pinnock, The Laws and Usages, 500–501.

112 John Ambrose Williams, Trial of John Ambrose Williams, for a Libel on the Clergy […] (Durham, 1823), 33.

113 Williams, Trial of John Ambrose Williams, 40.

114 The notion of popular culture as a resource to be variously appropriated by different groups derives from Roger Chartier, “Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin, 1984), 229–54, at 233.

115 Lacey, Listening, 7.

116 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 28–31 October 1699.

117 Observator (London), 7–10 February 1705.

118 Observator (London), 23 August 1704.

119 T. B. Howell, Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason […], vol. 17, 1726–1743 (London, 1813), 765–66.

120 Thomas Hearne's Diaries, Rawlinson MS 169, 71–77, Bodleian Library; Private Accounts of Thomas Hearne, Rawlinson MS 186a, 10–13, Bodleian Library.

121 Jonathan Oates, “The Rise and Fall of Jacobitism in Oxford,” Oxoniensia no. 68 (2003): 89–111, at 94, 99.

122 Listening was a tactic in the sense described by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (London, 1984), 96; this is contrast to the more Durkheimian dominance described by Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 62, 191n100.

123 Post Master (London), 18–21 June 1715; Norwich Gazette or Loyal Packet, 13 July 1717; John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (London, 2014), 27.

124 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 18–21 June 1715, 28–30 June 1715, 2–5 July 1715, 9–12 July 1715, 12–14 July 1715.

125 E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London, 1975), 165.

126 Daily Advertiser (London), 14 June 1745.

127 “James Collier to John Collier, 18 June 1745,” SAY/2/5/1/1864/1867, East Sussex Record Office.

128 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 29 September –1 October 1715.

129 London Evening Post, 14 August 1755; Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty, 14–17 April 1770; General Evening Post (London), 21–23 August 1770; York Courant, 21 August 1770.

130 “Achievements of Admiral Hawke,” Gentleman's Magazine, no. 30 (1760): 52–53.

131 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), 15 June 1785, 2 August 1785.

132 Whitehall Evening Post, 23–25 June 1785, 5–7 July 17, 9–12 July 1785.

133 General Advertiser (London), 2 July 1785.

134 Scots Magazine, no. 25 (1763): 293.

135 Jeffereyes Hamett O'Neale, “An exact representation of a certain wise body without a head in the East going to pay a visit to a certain great body in the West,” London, 1763, etching on paper, no. 31512i, Wellcome Library.

136 London Chronicle, 12 May 1763.

137 Public Advertiser (London), 14 May 1763.

138 London Chronicle, 14 May 1763.

139 Gazeteer and London Daily Advertiser, 14 May 1763.

140 General Evening Post (London), 3 November 1770.

141 Berrow's Worcester Journal, 12 May 1763.

142 London Evening Post, 11–14 October 1740; St. James's Evening Post, 5 March 1728; Norwich Gazette, 19 November 1743.

143 London Evening Post, 6 June 1767.

144 For another example in Preston, see Lloyd's Evening Post (London), 4 October 1769.

145 Brighton Gazette, 5 May 1831.

146 Leicester and Nottingham Journal, 4 January 1772; The mottos upon the eight bells for St. John's Church, Manchester […] (London, 1768).

147 Engraved on the fifth bell at Rye in 1775. See William Holloway, The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Town and Port of Rye […] (London, 1847), 513.

148 Worcester dumb-bells (London, 1710).

149 Weekly Journal or British Gazeteer (London), 6 June 1719.

150 St. James's Evening Post, 4 March 1732.

151 Gebhard Friedrich August Wendeborn, A View of England towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (London, 1791), 342.

152 Minister of the Church of England, An Endeavour after further union between conforming & nonconforming Protestants in several particulars (London, 1692), 6–7.

153 My thanks to Jonah Miller for this reference. “Consistory Court Depositions Book,” DL/C/0250, fols. 166–77v, London Metropolitan Archives.

154 Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post (London), 11 February 1721.

155 The Dissenters Conciencious Objections Against the Episcopal Church […] (London, 1705), 9.

156 T. Drummond, Letters to a young dissenter on the general principles of nonconformity […] (London, 1812), 27–31, quotation at 30.

157 Potkay, The Story of Joy, 89–91.

158 W. H. Gatty, “A Sketch of the History of the Parish of St. Mary-in-Arden, and the Township of Marker Harborough,” Transactions of the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society, no. 3 (1874):153–71, at 167–68.

159 “Answers to enquiries from Denton concerning nonconformists and church bells, 1706,” DN/MSC 2/19, Norfolk Record Office; “Letter from John Elliott, Minister of Randwick, Gloucestershire, 30 May 1826,” P263/IN/4/2, Gloucestershire Archives.

160 A Lover of Concord, “Legality of Dissenting Bells,” Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, no. 20 (1825): 533.

161 “Religious Intelligence,” Congregational Magazine, no. 1 (1825): 330–31.

162 Colin M. Haydon, “Samuel Peploe and Catholicism in Preston, 1714,” Recusant History 20, no. 1 (May 1990): 76–80, at 78 (emphasis mine).

163 31 Geo. III C.32.6.9.

164 Margaret M. Turnham, Catholic Faith and Practice in England, 1779–1992: The Role of Revivalism and Renewal (Woodbridge, 2015), 26.

165 Quoted in Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, “‘We Live So Far North’: The Church in the North-East of England,” in The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800, ed. Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain (Woodbridge, 2003), 223–242, at 233.

166 Flying Post or The Post Master (London), 12–14 July 1715.

167 Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Rev George Whitefield, vol. 2 (London, 1877), 82, 73, 110, 111. For similar, see Joseph Butterworth Bulmer Clark, ed., An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life of Adam Clarke (London, 1833), 222.

168 Phyllis Mack, “The Senses in Religion: Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century,” in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London, 2016), 85–108, at 94–97; David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London, 1984), 93; Joseph Entwistle, Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Entwistle [… ] (Bristol, 1846), 133, 211.

169 Michael Francis Snape, “Anti-Methodism in Eighteenth-Century England: The Pendle Forest Riots of 1748,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49, no. 2 (1998): 257–81, at 264–65.

170 John Wesley, An extract of the Rev. Mr. John Wesley's Journal, vol. 10, From February 15 1755 to June 16 1758 (London, 1788), 122.

171 “Proceedings in Law Relating to Protestant Dissenters,” Methodist Magazine no. 41 (1818): 386–87; W. M. Jacobs, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2002), 71.

172 Flying Post (London), 13–16 August 1715.

173 An Authentic Account of the Riots in Birmingham […] (Birmingham, 1791), 20.

174 Observator (London), 5–8 April 1710; Abel Boyer, Quadriennium annæ postremum […], vol. 1 (London, 1718–19), 505.

175 Observator (London), 18–21 October 1710.

176 Worcester dumb-bells.

177 John Whitehead, The life of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. [… ] (London, 1793), 175.

178 General Evening Post (London), June 8–10 1780; London Chronicle, 4–6 July 1780.

179 London Chronicle, 20–22 June 1780.

180 Derby Mercury, 18 March 1735–36; for similar, see World (London), 10 March 1790.

181 A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Esq., from a Dissenting Country Attorney […] (Birmingham, 1791), 65.

182 “Letter from Mary Burrough, Carleton Hall, Drigg, Cumberland to John Frewen,” 27 June 1807, FRE/1757, East Sussex Record Office.

183 Morning Post (London), 26 May 1825; Trewman's Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 26 May 1825; Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 23 May 1825; Ipswich Journal, 21 May 1825; Coventry Herald, 20 May 1825.

184 Morning Chronicle (London), 26 May 1825.

185 Morning Chronicle (London), 27 May 1825.

186 Liverpool Mercury, 2 December 1825.

187 Leeds Mercury, 15 August 1829.

188 Derby Mercury, 10 November 1830; Standard, 6 November 1833; Berrow's Worcester Journal, 7 November 1833; Liverpool Mercury, 8 November 1833; York Herald and General Advertiser, 12 November 1842; Manchester Times and Gazette, 9 November 1844; Morning Post (London), 7 November 1849; Preston Guardian, 9 November 1850; “Saffron Walden, Bell Ringer's bills, 1821–1848,” D/B 2/PAR13/37, Essex Record Office.

189 Leonard Lovechurch [George Smith], Letter to the inhabitants of Sheffield […] (Sheffield, 1798), 4, 13.

190 See the much-reprinted “The Merry Bells of England,” London, 1828, John Johnson Collection, Harding B16 (148b), Bodleian Library, Oxford; “The Factory Bells of England,” Leeds, 1855, John Johnson Collection, Harding B16 (83b), Bodleian Library, Oxford.

191 A more comprehensive study is one subject of my current research and current book project, “The Untimely Death of an Urban Soundscape.”

192 For good examples, see the essays in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, ed. Stephanie Downs, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (Oxford, 2018).

193 William M. Reddy, “Against Constructivism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (1997): 327–51.

194 Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, 2010), xii; Ileana Baird, “Introduction. Peregrine Things: Rethinking the Global in Eighteenth-Century Studies,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, ed. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu (Farnham, 2013), 1–16, at 11.

195 For the relationship between representatives’ places of residence and parliamentary seats, see Paul Langford, “Property and ‘Virtual Representation’ in Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 31, no. 1 (1988): 83–115.

196 Inscription on the third bell of All Saints, Northampton, 1782; see The History of the Town of Northampton (Northampton, 1847), 101.

197 On independence, see Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender in Georgian England (Manchester, 2005).

198 Bell-ringing might therefore be understood as another of the theatrical modes of authority described in E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 4 (1974): 382–405, at 389; Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, by Douglas Hay et al. (London, 2011), 17–63, at 26–31.

199 England had been described as such since the seventeenth century. For an early instance, see Abraham Markland, Poems on His Majesties birth and restauration […] (London, 1667), 53.

200 For political theory and the passions, see Albert O. Hirshman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 15; Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli, eds., Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850 (Princeton, 2009).

201 For similar observations from the perspective of the courtroom, see Amy Milka and David Lemmings, “Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Court Room,” Journal of Legal History 38, no. 2 (2017): 157–78.

202 Joanne Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2009), 5, 17; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 347; David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2011), 184–85.

203 George Woodward, “‘A thinking club!!,’” 1796, London, hand-colored etching, 1895,0617.449, British Museum; Geoffrey GAG-’EM-ALL, The Free-born Englishman deprived of his seven senses by the operation of the six new Acts of the boroughmongers (London, 1819).

204 The importance of sensory access in understanding the public sphere has been discussed by Ari Adut, “A Theory of the Public Sphere,” Sociological Theory 30, no. 4 (2012): 238–62; Lacey, Listening Publics.

205 G. L. Apperson, Dictionary of Proverbs, rev. Martin H. Manser, and Stephen Curtis (Ware, 2006), 211.

206 Steedman, Carolyn, “Inside, Outside, Other: Accounts of National Identity in the 19th Century,” History of the Human Sciences 8, no. 2 (1995): 59–76, at 60–61; Kennedy, Catriona, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2013), 2–6.

207 For example, see Conway, Stephen, “War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Isles,” English Historical Review 116, no. 468 (2001): 863–93, at 887.

208 Segal, Lynne, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London, 2018); for the contemporary politics of schadenfreude, see Smith, Tiffany Watt, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another's Misfortune (London, 2018), 113–27.