Penrose Brooke collection, 1727-2020

Given that a number of the manuscripts are directly connected with Robert Southey, it seems that many of them might have been gathered at Greta Hall before being passed on, perhaps to Mary (Penrose) Arnold in 1839. The closest connection between the Arnolds and the Southeys would have been through Herbert Hill (1810-1892), the son of Herbert Hill (1750-1828) Southey's maternal uncle and benefactor. Herbert Hill Jr. married Southey's daughter Bertha in 1839. He had been assistant master at Ruby under Thomas Arnold from 1836 to 1839. Perhaps Arnold's wife Mary let it be known in 1839 (to Bertha Southey Hill?) that she was gathering manuscript materials for an album.

Between 1800 and 1840 four monarchs occupied the throne in England: George III till 1820, George IV till 1830, William IV till 1837, and Victoria, starting her long reign as an eighteen-year old with guidance from Lord Melbourne. The nineteenth century saw twenty prime ministers, twelve of which (or their close descendants) appear in this collection: Spencer Perceval (256), Lord Liverpool (F4), the Duke of Wellington (12), Sir George Grey (209), Viscount Melbourne (265, F5, F6), Sir Robert Peel (208), Lord John Russell (116), Earl of Derby (23), Viscount Palmerston (282), William Ewart Gladstone (12), Marquess of Salisbury (F16), and the Earl of Rosebery (119), five of them Tories or Conservatives, seven of them Whigs or Liberals. These twenty prime ministers presided over a century of hard-won change. Following a century of industrial revolution (the ironworks at Coalbrookdale were founded in 1709, and the nearby Iron Bridge built in 1781) the early 1800s saw widespread mechanization of what had been hand crafts, leading to Luddite industrial unrest (loom framebreakers 1811-1813, destruction of threshing machines, 1830). At the same time, the two-front wars (against Napoleon, 1803-1815, and the American War of 1812 -1815) had been costly, leading to increased taxation and consequent unrest, as well as widespread hunger and unemployment. The development of railways from 1825 transformed travel but at the same time changed the relationship of rural and urban communities. The debate between free trade and import tariffs oversaw a half century of famine and argument on private landed interests (marked by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819), while parliament also debated electoral reform, ending in the Reform Act of 1832 transferring power from rural ("rotten borough") areas to the new industrial centers of power. Other major reforms included the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 and the Abolition of Slavery itself throughout the British Empire in 1833. Finally, Catholic Emancipation was finally achieved in 1829 after long argument through the efforts of two Conservatives, Wellington and Peel.

There would have been many opportunities to reflect on these revolutionary developments as the autographs of public figures (reformist and conservative) were gathered. We can presume that Mary Penrose's sisters and Brooke sisters-in-law were intelligent observers of the political scene. Certainly Mary's son Matthew Arnold's hugely influential essay Culture and Anarchy (1867-1869), can be taken as representative of the Arnold/Penrose/Brooke view: a liberal argument against middle-class "Philistinism" and materialism.