Print, Publicity and Radicalism in the 1790s

Front matter

PRINT, PUBLICITY AND RADICALISM IN THE 1790S The Laurel of Liberty

JON MEE

PRINT, PUBLICITY, AND POPULAR RADICALISM IN THE 1790S

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on references List of abbreviations

Introduction: the open theatre of the world?

PART I PUBLICITY, PRINT, AND ASSOCIATION t Popular radical print culture: ‘the more public the better’

Part II Radical Personalities

3 “Once a squire and now a Man’: Robert Merry and the pains of politics

4 ‘The ablest head, with the blackest heart:’ Charles Pigott and the scandal of radicalism

5 Citizen Lee at the “Tree of Liberty’ 6 John Thelwall and the ‘whole will of the nation’ Notes

Bibliography Index vii page viii ix

III 113

149 168

188 236 261

Illustrations

1 W. H. Reid, ‘Hum! Hum! A New Song’ [1793] © The

British Library Board. page 6

2 Daniel Isaac Eaton [A Circular, together with a prospectus of a series of political pamphlets.] © The British Library Board.

3 James Gillray, London-Corresponding-Society alarm ‘d: vide guilty consciences [1798]. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.

4 [Robert Thomson] A New song, to an old tune,-viz. “God save the king”. © The British Library Board.

5 Wonderful Exhibition!!! Signor Gulielmo Pittachio (1794). Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

6 Richard Newton, Soulagement en Prison, or Comfort in Prison. Lewis Walpole Library (1793). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library.

7 Richard Newton, Promenade on the State Side of Newgate. (1793).

Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

8 Amusement for Starving Mechanics. For the benefit of the Tythe and Tax Club. Shortly will be performed, the comical tragedy of Long Faces, etc. [A squib.][1795?]. © The British Library Board.

9 King Killing. [A handbill, reprinted from one entitled “Tyrannicide.’] [London, 1797 [1795?]] © The British Library Board.

10 John Thelwall, Spies and Informers. On Wednesday, Feb. 5. 1794, J. Thelwall will begin a course of lectures on the most important branches of political morality, etc. [A posting bill.] © The British Library Board.

u When the late dreadful accident, etc. [A handbill charging the king with callousness in regard to the accident at the Haymarket Theatre, 3 February 1794.] [London, 1794.] © The British Library Board.

viii

33 46 80

Acknowledgements

And nothing starts in the archive, nothing, ever at all, though things

certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories

caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities (Carolyn Steedman, Dust)

My own strain of archive fever has driven this project forward for nearly three decades. The final periods of intensive research were made possible by an AHRC Fellowship that gave me invaluable time at the British Library, the National Archives, Kew, and in the Seligman Collection at Columbia University. I'd like to thank the archivists and librarians at these institutions and also the Bodleian Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the John Rylands Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, Nuffield College, Oxford, and Worcester College, Oxford. I am also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the ‘Networks of Improvement’ project. My work on associations in the late eighteenth century for the project has fed directly into this book.

I can easily recover the book’s moment of inception. It came when reading E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class as an undergraduate in 1981, but my fascination with the subject matter was sealed when Marilyn Butler very kindly lent me the manuscript of Iain McCalman’s Radical Underworld to read as a Ph.D. student. My debts to Marilyn, who is deeply missed by everyone, are many and varied, but few compare to this introduction to a lasting and inspiring friend. Soon afterwards, Marilyn also introduced me to Mark Philp whose encouragement and inspiration also pervade these pages. Near the end of the research, he and I spent some happy days in the Treasury Solicitor’s papers hunting down radicals. I was lucky to have the fruit of his research, in the shape of Reforming Ideas in Britain, to see me through the final year of writing this book.

x Acknowledgements

Final preparation of the manuscript was completed at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York, where I followed in the footsteps of John Barrell and Harriet Guest. The staff have been highly supportive in all kinds of ways, not least in providing continual food for thought in relation to the material in this book. The centre has been an immensely stimulating environment to work in and Pd like to thank Mary Fairclough, Mark Jenner, Catriona Kennedy, Emma Major, Alison O’Byrne, Jane Rendall, Jim Walvin, and Jim Watt for directly contributing advice and ideas. Clare Bond has been a particular point of sanity. I look forward to drawing on their time and patience for years to come. Pd also like to thank the English Department at York, especially David Attwell, and the F. R. Leavis Fund for its help with illustrations.

Gillian Russell has been crucial to this book as a friend and colleague. Id like to thank her for including me on her Australian Research Council grant. Gillian and Kate Horgan generously shared their discoveries from the archives of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). The grant allowed me to visit Australia more than once and I am grateful to John and Mary Ann Hughes for their hospitality in Sydney. Deirdre Coleman, Susan Conley, and Clara Tuite always make Melbourne a wonderful place to visit. Michael T. Davis’s work on the LCS has been an important source for this book. I am grateful to him for all the help he has given. I look forward to his forthcoming study of Daniel Isaac Eaton. John Seed gave me lots of useful tips, not least in relation to Lord Gordon and the Protestant Association. He alerted me to the name “Thomas Hardy’ on the petition of the Protestant Association. David Worrall’s work on radical culture and more recently on the theatre has always been illuminating. Most recently, Susan Snell, Archivist at the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, gave me some fascinating pointers to relations between the LCS and the masons. The topic deserves further study than was possible in this book. Working on the 1790s has produced a lot of happy collaborations and a genuine sense that the material discussed in this book will be developed and taken forward by a number of younger scholars who have already been gracious in discussing their research with me. David Fallon, James Grande, Georgina Green, Ian Newman, David O’Shaughnessy, and Yasmin Solomonescu have been especially helpful. No one can work in the archive of the Royal Literary Fund without benefiting from Matthew Sangster’s help. Penelope Corfield and Amanda Goodrich have given me thoughtful advice on the material in this book more than once. Colin Jones and Simon MacDonald generously shared some of their discoveries relating to Robert Thomson in Paris. Joanna Innes has often said things

Acknowledgements xi that made me think twice. Rachel Rogers was very helpful on the British in Paris more generally, not least in relation to Robert Merry’s writing about the French constitution. Pamela Clemit has always been helpful, especially with Godwin’s letters. Amy Garnai has regularly shared her version of the Merry bug with me in conversation. Thanks also to Robert Jones and David Taylor for finally explaining the ‘arrows’ in Merry’s hat.

I am also grateful to Tom Mole and the other participants in the ‘Interpersonal Print’ conference at McGill in 2013 who helped clarify some of my ideas around ‘print magic’. See http://interactingwithprint.org/ for an account of the full breadth of the ongoing ‘Interacting with Print project. Various trips to California have also allowed me to present papers and discuss ideas over the past two decades. Usually these have been hosted either by Kevin Gilmartin or Saree Makdisi. ’'m grateful to both for providing such enlivening contexts for me to discuss and present my work. Returning to Kevin’s writing on popular radicalism after 1815 in the later stages of preparing this book provided a great stimulus for my thinking about radical culture in the 1790s. Helen Deutsch has always been hospitable and encouraging. Michael Meranze was always just about tolerant of the detail. Roxanne Eberle generously shared her knowledge of Amelia Alderson with me. Sarah Knott alerted me to Pigott’s involvement in Coghlan’s memoirs, and gave me the chance to read a draft of her article on ‘female liberty’.

Some of the material, especially in Part 11, has been discussed in essays and articles published over the past twenty years or so. I am grateful to the editors in each case for their advice and support; details can be found in the bibliography. Thanks also to James Chandler, Linda Bree, and Anna Bond for shepherding me through the press. I’m also grateful to the readers who provided the reports that enabled me to focus my argument more clearly through the last stage of writing. Most of all I am grateful to Jane, Sharmila, and the rest of my family, not least for putting up with my mind being on the Treasury Solicitor’s papers, when it should more often have been on them.

Note on references

Where manuscripts are reproduced in Mary Thale’s Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, then I have used it as a reference to make access easier for the reader. Otherwise I have referred to the original manuscripts in either the British Library or National Archives. See notes and bibliography for details of the individual manuscripts.

Bibliographical references to printed materials are given in short form in the notes with full details in the bibliography, newspapers and periodicals excepted, where details are provided in the relevant note, or sometimes simply by date in the main text in the case of eighteenth-century newspapers.

xii

AUM Barrell and Mee

IKD

LCS

LT

MPM

SCI

Abbreviations

American Universal Magazine

Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792—1794, ed. John Barrell and Jon Mee. 8 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006-7

John Barrell, Imagining the Kings Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793—1796. Oxford University Press, 2000

London Corresponding Society

Thelwall, Mrs [Henrietta Cecil], The Life of John Thelwall, by his Widow. Vol. 1, London: 1837

Moral and Political Magazine of the LCS. 2 vols. London, 1796-7

Society for Constitutional Information

Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792—1799, ed Mary Thale. Cambridge University Press, 1983 xiii

Introduction: the open theatre of the world?

The French Revolution was widely regarded at the time as an unprecedented event. One unexpected consequence in London was the emergence of a remarkably rich and vibrant popular radical culture. Enthusiasm for this phenomenon may often steer my tone towards the celebratory, but this book aims to give a sense of the aspirations, complexities, and contradictions involved in the creation of a broad-based movement for radical change in Britain. The story of the radical societies has been told before, primarily by political historians, usually in relation to the unfolding of larger narratives of the struggle for parliamentary reform or the creation of working-class consciousness. Those narratives are important here, but my approach is particularly concerned with the emergence of popular radicalism through experiment, contestation, and performance, especially in its relations to the medium of print and the associational world that surrounded it. Print is taken in this book to have been a condition of possibility for a popular radical platform, creating the circumstances for London to act as the major clearing house of ideas and as the organisational centre of a movement spread across the four nations of Britain. Print made it possible to think of consulting and mediating what Thelwall called ‘the whole will of the nation’.' Beyond their practical engagement with the medium, the participants themselves shared important assumptions and ideas about print, not least the deep faith they frequently showed in its efficacy as an agent of emancipation. This faith tended towards a form of magical thinking when it assumed a power in the medium regardless of causative relations.”

The passing of the Two Acts in 1795 severely curtailed the activities of the popular societies and provides a partial endpoint to this study. The Acts made it impossible for meetings of more than fifty people to gather without the explicit permission of a magistrate and increased the punishments for what were deemed seditious activities. Leaving aside the implications for the law of treason, so eloquently discussed by John Barrell, the

I

Seditious Meetings Bill had grave repercussions for the kinds of events the LCS could undertake and the kinds of spaces it could operate in.’ There was a sense in the country at large that the guiding spirit of reform was being threatened with extinction, even though the LCS was not actually banned until 1799. In the build up to the 1795 legislation, Robert Sands wrote from Perth about the difficult part London had been given to play in what he called ‘the Comedy of Regeneration’:

We look up to the London Corresponding Society, and the Others who have affiliated with them. We know the whole depends on their exertions and that without them nothing can be done. It is an old doctrine of mine that the Metropolis is the same to a Nation as the heart is to the body: it is the seat of life. If it is pure the whole body must be so, and vice versa. If the Chanel [sic] of corruption is not stopt [sic] in London, you cannot expect it to be so in Perth or anywhere else.*

Relations between regional societies and those in London were not as straightforward or as deferential as this may sound. More than once even provincial English societies refused to comply fully with the protocols that the LCS sent them, as was the case with the Tewkesbury Society discussed in Chapter 2. The LCS itself was sometimes subject to internal conflict, for instance, when it came to relations between the executive and its divisions. Nevertheless these tensions themselves speak to the key role London played in the creation of a popular radical platform out of material practices embedded in complex social relations.

Placing this study within the series ‘Cambridge Studies in Romanticism’ implies an understanding of popular radicalism as a kind of ‘literary’ culture. At least, it argues for the centrality of the writing, production, and circulation of printed texts that took up so much of the time of the radical societies. If aspects of this approach are ‘literary’ in general terms, the book is not intended to provide a backdrop to Romanticism and its major poets, novelists, and playwrights.’ In certain respects, this formation and the associated identification of the literary with what John Thelwall called ‘sallies of the imagination’ were the product of a crisis brought on by the emergence of the popular radical culture opened up in this book, but the story is not a straightforward one. Thelwall himself could identify ‘literature’ both with a domain of imagination separable from politics and with print as the principal engine of emancipatory change. My aim has been to pay attention to the everyday labours of the radical societies in creating a public sphere through print and associated practices, from poring over the proper forms of addresses to be issued in their names to penning songs and toasts for tavern meetings.’ Robert Thomson’s efforts writing and collecting for the LCS songs — discussed in Chapter 2 — may represent an uncanny parallel to his brother George’s work with Robert Burns, but for all the reorientation to popular melodies in polite taste at this time political songs were rarely allowed into the realm of the ‘literary’.® The lyrical or literary ballad, as Ian Newman has shown, was increasingly severed from the convivial space of the alehouse in the emergent cultural field scholars now identify with Romanticism.’ Ironically, for some members of the LCS, Francis Place among them, such activities were too raucous to be regarded as properly within the republic of letters. On these terms, the identification of ‘literature’ with improvement could separate it from Thomson’s songs and toasts just as effectively as the idea that it belonged primarily to an interiorised realm of the imagination.

In terms of those who frequented and created this culture, the picture that emerges is not one peopled solely by ‘the radical artisan’ often associated with E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.'° This divergence may be accentuated by my focus on print and its associated practices, but it also speaks to a period when radical discourse was largely concerned with a split between the represented and the unrepresented, between a narrow identification of the political nation with the elite and a broader idea of ‘the people’. Many of the subaltern classes who involved themselves in the popular societies did not have easy access to the medium of print because they could not write or sometimes even read. Nevertheless, they frequently interacted with print by hearing pamphlets and newspaper paragraphs read aloud at meetings or joining in with songs that were circulated on printed sheets. The popular societies were made up of a broad social range from what Thomas Hardy called ‘the lower and middling class of society called the people’. The LCS’s collaboration for most of the period 1792-5 with the more polite Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) only further complicates these social issues.

Within this broad formation there were a number of ‘gentleman’ radicals, such as Joseph Gerrald, who were members of both societies. Gerrald became a flamboyant hero of the struggle in 1793; his fate — transportation to Botany Bay and an early death — made him a print celebrity to the radical societies in 1794-5 and beyond. Gerrald seems to have been associated with another gentleman, Robert Merry, an SCI member active in the collaborations with the LCS in 1792, even if he never joined the more popular society. Gerrald and Merry had both been students of Samuel Parr, ‘the Whig Dr. Johnson’, attended SCI meetings together in 1792, and came to know and be influenced by Parr’s friend

Godwin. The progressive education both received from Parr seems to have taken fire at the French Revolution and driven them into contact with men from very different social backgrounds.” Friends of Merry saw in this process — discussed in detail in Chapter 3 — a fundamental loss of social identity:

The change in his political opinions gave a sullen gloom to his character which made him relinquish all his former connexions, and unite with people far beneath his talents, and quite unsuitable to his habits."*

A more precipitous descent can be traced in Charles Pigott — tracked in Chapter 4 — with whom Gerrald and Merry both associated. By February 1794, isolated after being discharged from prison, Pigott was a member of the LCS, but also touting for as much hackwork as he could get, producing a spurious volume of scandalous memoirs and the scabrous attacks on aristocratic women in the Female Jockey Club, before his death from prison fever. His personal circumstances in 1794 may have driven Pigott further in this direction, but in terms of their later populist orientation it is worth noting that both he and Merry were using the newspapers to communicate their opinions from at least as early as the 1780s. They were well aware — as Merry put it to Samuel Rogers — of the effects of a ‘daily insinuation’ in the press.”

The popular radical movement often owned these elite activists with pride, not without serious reservations in Pigott’s case, but respect for literary talents with the pen did not simply translate into social deference. The shoemaker Thomas Hardy was the key figure of the 1792-4 period, prior to the treason trials. Highly literate, purposeful, and well read in the canon of English liberty, he learned from Scottish Presbyterian traditions that placed a high premium on modest confidence in one’s own abilities."° Hardy doesn’t seem to have felt any desire to be known as an author or even the founder of the society. Thelwall, on the other hand, claimed for himself a genteel ancestry, and had already struggled to make a way for himself as a writer and editor after abortive careers as a silk mercer, a tailor, and a lawyer. Thelwall never abandoned his literary aspirations, even if at different times in his life they seemed to lie in a far from simple relation to his politics.

Others who merit more extended treatment than constraints of space will allow in this book include William Hamilton Reid. In the 1780s, Reid — ‘the son of persons occupying no higher status than that of domestic servants’ — had been puffed as the English Burns by the newspaper editor James Perry.” He was soon supplying copy at a penny a line for the Gazetteer, especially translations of continental news, along with poetry and songs. For the LCS, where he was active from at least June 1792, he knocked out productions like ‘Hum! Hum! A New Song’ shown here (Figure 1). Reid seems to have seceded from the LCS in 1795 for religious reasons, joining the shadowy group sometimes known as the Society for Moral and Political Knowledge. Driven underground after the Two Acts, he was arrested at one of their meetings in February 1798. Even then he continued to pursue an aspiration to write, bringing out The rise and dissolution of the infidel societies in this metropolis (1800), with the support of the bishops of Durham and London, before turning his coat once again to publish a biography of the SCI leader John Horne Tooke.”

Religion remained an important aspect of print culture for W. H. Reid throughout his literary career, as it did for the clerk Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, who first appeared in print as the religious poet ‘Ebenezer’, before the period of a few months transformed him into Citizen Lee, a journey traced more fully in Chapter 5. Thelwall, Reid, and Lee all aspired to authorship before they joined the popular societies. Others seem to have first found their voice via their involvement. John Baxter, for instance, followed up the pamphlet Resistance to Oppression (1795), discussed in Chapter 2, with A new and impartial history of England (1796) dedicated to the efforts of the LCS. Numerous others unknown must have written songs, helped frame addresses, and so on. Not all aspired to become authors; a few sustained a position as writers, several (or their widows) later applied to the Literary Fund for relief, including Reid and his fellow LCS songwriter Robert Thomson. Literary aspirations were not necessarily the equivalent of a desire for self-expression that placed a premium on the individual over the struggle. Men like Reid and Thelwall may have been first drawn to a career in print on the assumption that the republic of letters in its proper form was a sphere open to talents underwritten by the freedom of the press, but they soon discovered that this was far from the case and pressed for a more genuinely accessible domain.

In so far as they can be reconstructed from the archive, these backstories also indicate that the popular radicalism of the 1790s was the product of forces that reached back before 1789, even as they were crucially influenced by the sense of the French Revolution as an unprecedented event. The Revolution was both a sign such men had been expecting, a fulfilment of a spirit of progress they believed they were sustaining, and something that required them to rethink their relations to power. Synchronically, radicalism in the 1790s was not the expression of a coherent ideological code or language, but the product of the social practices of the surrounding culture

Hum! Hum!

A NEW SONG.

À By Mr. W. H. REID. & ere L OME let-us all rejoice and fing with thankful gratulation,

The dangers we've efcap’d of late, oh! what.a happy nation ! Such virtuous men we’ve at the Helm, no creature need to watch em, - Withal fo wife and prudent, that the devil cannot match ’em.

; Hum, hum, bum,

I

Secure and fhug we thought ourfelves, nor were of danger dreaming, Till thofe more wife and watchful Elves faw powder plots a {cheming ; - And if they had not catch’d the rogues juft in the lucky minute, Deftruction would have op’d its jaws, and we been fwallow’d in it- = z eae Hum, Se.

Til,

An army of. Republicans and hungry murd’ring fitiners, Contriv’d to blow the Tower up and feize on all our dinners; So war againft em was declar’d by all the country round, fir, But fince for them we ’ve hunting been, a foul cannot be found, fir.

y Fe.

IV.

‘His Effigy it hould be bumt by thofe who coud’at read, fire-

V.

Afociation was the word for property’s protection,

And thofe who had a penny, fear’d a halfpenny’s defeftion; |

And even the clofe prifoners, the profpe& bright did fhare, fir,

And thank’d his gracious Majefty, that they were free as air, fir. : 3 Hum, Sc.

VI. 2

Now all the Parith officers were burning with ambition,

To fee their names in newfpapers, as haters of fedition = f

'Thefe men had no vanity, but true to the blood royal,

‘They eat and drank like aldermen, to prove that they were loa S Z 3 OSs

VIL :

Now Johnny Bull he feem’d quite pleas’d, and in a fupple humour, Yet ’t was not fit he fhould be eas’d from all alarm and rumour; And as that'he is apt to dofe; when fome folks ceafe to fwagger, _ Old Teddy Burke was fet to work to flourifh with his eae &, Ai n See

VIIL

Says he, the French are Deifts turn’d, and left their true devotions, And therefore we muft go to war, to rettify their notions ; fi Then oh! for all the Prefgangs to take Johnny from his wife, fir, . And fend him tò be facrific’d to fetch a king to life, fir. - b 5 > Ham, Sea

IX.

Now war ’tis plain. makes riches flow without encreafing taxes, "i Tuftead of laying bardeson it every one relaxes; i We fight to make the Frenchmen free, in fpite of Brunfwick’s letter, `. “So God preferve his Majetty, we ne'er hall geta better, : at : ages x Hum, hum, kum,

=

Fig1 W. H. Reid, ‘Hum! Hum! A New Song’ [1793]. © The British Library Board.

reacting to events and ideas. This book understands radical culture as a complex and unstable field of forces, ‘fragmented’ as Mark Philp has it, reacting to events in France, and indeed to global forces and events; seeking to influence change in Britain and aspiring to influence change in a wider world.”

For many of those involved, books were regarded as a principal agent of political change, sharing Louis Mercier’s belief that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) had not only roused the American colonists but also provided ‘a general shock to the political world, which has given birth to a great empire, and a new order of things’.*° This idea was reinforced by the general explosion of print in the final decades of the eighteenth century and the rapid development of an infrastructure that enabled the transmission of knowledge.” Most historians of print identify a takeoff in the number of imprints from as early as the 1760s.** Nevertheless the trade was far from industrialised, print runs were relatively small, and booksellers and printers — many of whom joined the radical societies — often provided a close-knit form of interaction with writers and readers of a sort noted many times in these pages. The idea of a political society as the hub for the creation, collection, and dissemination of political information in print was a defining feature of both the SCI and the LCS. Both societies also eagerly exploited formats that had been extending the reach of the press, especially newspapers and periodicals, acting upon a widespread belief that they had become integral to the political process. “But, gradually, they have assumed a more extensive office’, wrote the New Annual Register in 1782, ‘they have become the vehicles of political discussion in a far higher degree than they formerly were, and, in this respect, they have acquired a national importance.’ Some members of the radical societies, as we have already seen, had already exploited these media in the 1780s and were to continue to exploit them in the 1790s. The LCS used newspapers to advertise its meetings and was very close to Sampson Perry’s newspaper the Argus, at least in 1792, and then the Courier and the Telegraph in 1794-5. In terms of periodicals, the LCS twice attempted to compete in the market for information with its own: the short-lived Politician that struggled into life at the end of 1794, and the marginally more successful Moral and Political Magazine (1796-7).

Various associational practices had become interwoven with such formats over the course of the eighteenth century. Periodicals frequently reported the activities of clubs and societies, which often formed themselves around subscriptions. Books clubs and reading societies circulated their rules and regulations, sometimes printed in periodicals, producing a high degree of uniformity across their activities.“* Many of the protocols of the SCI and the LCS were governed by these emergent general conditions for interacting with print. Except for the fact that many reading societies banned the discussion of politics and controversial religion in their rules, the first gathering of Thomas Hardy and his friends in the Bell in January 1792 looks like just such a group. Hardy’s decision in 1806 to donate his political pamphlets to the Mitcham Book Society seems to acknowledge the continuities. Songs and toasts were an important aspect of the structured conviviality of the associational world more generally. The vigour supplied by Robert Thomson’s songs and toasts seems to have saved LCS divisions threatening to fold in 1792. Although oral performance was central to the vivifying effects they had on dwindling divisions, bringing those who could not read into the associational world, circulation of songs and toasts around the society often depended on print. The medium also allowed Thomson and others to reproduce songs for LCS meetings that had previously been used in very different social milieux.