"Ludwig van Beethoven baptized in Bonn; the date of his birth was probably 16 December. Until 1790, Beethoven thought that he was a year younger than he actually was; later he believed it was two years . . . . It is unclear whether this was due to a mistake or deception on the part of his father, wishing to pass the boy off as a prodigy. His grandfather, also Ludwig van Beethoven (1712-73), was Kapellmeister of the Electoral Court Chapel in Bonn; his father, Johann van Beethoven (c. 1740-92), who was Beethoven 's first teacher of the violin and piano, was a singer in the Bonn Chapel. Two younger brothers, Caspar Anton Carl and Nikolaus Johann, were born in 1774 and 1776" (Dahlhaus x).
William Murray, Lord Mansfield, hears the case of James Somerset, a slave who was brought to England from Virginia by his master and refused to return. Mansfield orders Somerset "discharged," ruling that there is no legal basis for slavery in England. Sir William Blackstone's *Commentaries on the Laws of England* notes the decision.
The case of Joseph Knight, slave, against Wedderburn, owner, extends the Mansfield decision with a ruling that slavery is illegal in Scotland and that Knight can neither be forced into service nor forced to leave the country for service elsewhere.
Luke Colingwood, captain of the slave ship Zong, orders 133 weak and diseased slaves ejected into shark infested waters in order to collect on a policy that held the insurer liable for cargo jettisoned in order to salvage the remainder.
Olaudah Equiano brings the Zong incident to the attention of the abolition movement; the insurance trial (not about the captain's criminal liability, but rather the insurer's financial liability) is presided over by Mansfield who rules for the captain.
"Cramer's Magazin der Musik for 2 March carries the following announcement by Neefe:
Louis van Betthoven . . . a lad of 11 years, with a very promising talent. He plays the piano very adeptly and with vigour, reads at sight very well: no more need be said than that above all he plays Das wohltemperierte Clavier of Sebastian Bach, at the instigation of Herr Neefe. Those who are acquainted with this collection of preludes and fugues in every key (which might also be called the non plus ultra) will understand what that means. As far as his other activitites permit, Herr Neefe has also given him instruction in thoroughbass. At present he is training him in composition for the piano, 9 variations on a march, engraved in Mannheim. This young genius deserves assistance to allow him to travel. He would certainly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, if he progresses as he has begun. (Dahlhaus xii)
T. G. P. Spear, in *The Nabobs*, maintains that, under Cornwallis and Wellesley in general, bigotry and evangelism succeed a more respectful treatment of native culture. However, it is difficult to believe that Hastings had anything to do with respect, given this statement written in 1813: "The Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions . . . . Their proficiency and skill in [minimal occupations] are little more than the dexterity which any animal with similar conformation, but with no higher intellect than a dog, an elephant, or a monkey might be supposed to be capable of attaining."
Governor-Generals (they were called "Nabobs") Cornwallis and Wellesley continue what was begun under Hastings, exporting opium grown in Bengal to China, smuggling it in in exchange for silver bullion. By 1815, this business was the major support of the British Administration in India.
In May 1788, *Analytical Review* began publication, edited by Thomas Christie and published by Joseph Johnson, the Unitarian bookseller. Their aim was to provide "a principal repository of sentiments most favourable to rational liberty, both in politics and religion" [Preface]. Johnson recruited Dissenters and "Jacobins" to write "analytical" reviews--i.e. review emphasizing the structure and main analytical lines of the book's arguments and information rather than the reviewer's "opinion"--though of course both were performed in this explicitly political, dissenting journal. Contributors: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Alexander Geddes, Henry Fuseli, William Cowper, John Aikin, James Currie, among others. Around the *Review* gathered the radical intellectuals prominent in the 1790s (Paine, Horne Tooke, Blake, etc.). The *Review* later collapsed during the anti-Jacobin campaign in 1799. Circulation, about 1500, compared to 5,000 for the longer established *Monthly Review* (since 1749) and 3,500 for *Critical Review* (1756). (Written by Jon Klancher.)
"After the death of Haydn, Beethoven considered Cherubini the greatest living composer. He wrote to him in 1823:
It is with great pleasure that I seize the opportunity to approach you in writing. I have often done so in spirit, for I esteem yours above all other theatrical works. Only, the world of art has good reason to regret that it is a long time since a new theatrical work by you has appeared, at least in our Germany. Highly as true connoisseurs also esteem your other works, it is nevertheless a true loss to art not to possess any new product of your great genius for the theatre'" (Dahlhaus xiv).
The system for appointing Parliamentary representatives had been established in 1295. Since that time, social changes had led to the growth of new industrial cities that had no representatives, while the stagnation of some rural areas and political maneuvering to gain control of some boroughs that elected one or two representatives had reduced the number of eligible voters to a few individuals who sold their votes to the highest bidder ("rotten boroughs") or who were under the control of one influential landlord.
In The Early Illuminated Books, one among the series of books reproducing Blake's works recently issued by Princeton Univ. Press and the William Blake Trust, Morris Eaves argues firmly for dating the etching of plates and the printing of at least one copy of MHH in 1790: "Without an informative title page, the Marriage has had to be dated by other means. . . . [1790] is firmly, if not certainly, based on a bit of evidence in Blake's hand. In copy F, . . . above the first line on line on plate 3 he penned in `1790' in order to anchor a complex allusion to the `thirty-three years since' 1757, the date of Blake's birth and the Swedenborgian Last Judgment. . . . Altogether, the best evidence suggests that the twenty-seven plates of the Marriage took [ Blake] months rather than years . . . . Blake probably etched and printed the Marriage shortly after Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel but before he began etching the forty-five plates for Salzmann's Elements of Morality, the first eighteen of which are dated 1 October 1790" (Eaves 113-15).
While all critics agree that Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell was at least begun in 1790 because Blake wrote "1790" on one page (plate 3) of one of the copies (copy F or "the Butts copy"), they disagree as to when this illuminated work was completed (Eaves 113, 145; E 801). Many assert that this satire written in poetry and prose was completed in 1793, and they assign this later date for three reasons:
1 and 2 are not definitive. As to 3, Eaves has effectively argued that the "Our End is Come" print is an adventitious rather than integral insertion: "`Our End' was not, however, `integrally printed with copy B' as Bentley claims (Blake 1:692), nor is this leaf `conjugate with the succeeding leaf' (Bentley 287n.). In fact, `Our End' and the Marriage are in different media, intaglio and relief, that require different kinds of printing. They could not be printed together. . . . `Our End is come' cannot establish a 1793 date for the Marriage, because copy B and its frontispiece were printed separately" (Eaves 113-4).
As to the 1792 date: a few definitive sources, including the Norton anthology, say that "A Song of Liberty," the last three plates of the 27-plate work, was "etched" (Norton 6th, p. 54) or "engraved in 1792" (Bloom 22), thereby in effect dating the completion of the poem in 1792. There is no physical or textual evidence that those plates were etched at that time (which makes the physicality of the assertion, that the plates were "etched," rather interesting: why the need to insist physically upon this late date?). Rather, it is based on David Erdman's argument that items in "A Song of Liberty" allude to the 1792 Battle of Valmy, a questionable assertion (Erdman 152 n. 7, 192; Eaves 114-5).
Joseph Priestley was discoverer of oxygen, Unitarian liberal theologian, and member of the Lunar Society of leading Midlands intellectuals, including Dr. Erasmus Darwin, James Watt (inventor of the steam engine), Matthew Boulton, and the educational theorist Thomas Day. In 1794, Priestley emigrated to the U.S.
Following the publication of Burke's "An Appeal for the New to the Old Whigs," the Whig Party splits over the stance to take vis-a-vis revolutionary France. Burke and most Whigs support Pitt's foreign policy; Fox, Sheridan, and approximately one third of the Whigs support Peace with France. (See O'Gorman.)
"Haydn, stopping in Bonn in July, on his way from London to Vienna, meets Beethoven and accepts him as a pupil. In November Beethoven leaves for Vienna. He never returned to Bonn. In an album of farewell, Count Waldstein writes: 'Through incessant industry, may you receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn'" (Dahlhaus xiv).
Launched in May 1793, the *British Critic* gathered conservative scholars, under the editorship of a philologist, Robert Nares, to compete with the four reviews edited by Dissenters (*Analytical* [see May 1788], *Monthly* [1749], *Critical* [1756], *English*)--hence it became an important opening to the anti-Jacobin reaction that gathered momentum through 1798. With circulations comparable to leading reviews (3,500), the *British Critic* employed orientalists (Joseph White), physicists (Jean Andre de Luc), economists (John Brand), antiquarians (Thomas Percy), etc., to compete against progressive analysis/opinion in other reviews. (Written by Jon Klancher; see also Roper.)
"Haydn is said to have advised against the publication of the C minor trio, and Op. 2, not Op. 1, is dedicated to him" (Dahlhaus xv).