Utilitarians, educators, poets: the beginnings of the Westminster Review and the London Mechanics’ Institution

The Westminster Review and the London Mechanics’ Institution were established within months of each other in 1823–24. The prestige periodical, founded on faith in the power of print media to improve lives by the diffusion of knowledge through the social body, and the institution undertaking a more direct and practical route to the same end, were evidently of the same political spirit and historical moment. This article seeks to add texture to the early history of these two initiatives and the radical London milieu that produced them by delving beneath the official documented accounts into the subterranean networks that connected the Westminster and the London Mechanics’ Institution in the mid-1820s. In so doing it complicates a too easy identification of the relationship between them as simply one of shared utilitarian and party political ideology. It looks beyond public manifestos to consider other sources, such as Anna Birkbeck’s album (begun in 1825), which brings familiar figures into different relation, and introduces new names, such as Mary Shelley, into the interwoven threads that represented radical London at this time. Other stories, like that of the Greek Committee, whose secretary John Bowring, also editor of the Westminster, contributed a poem on George Birkbeck to the album, cut across the histories of the journal Bowring edited and the mechanics’ institution he supported. Other actors, such as Lord Byron, and other forms — poems, cartoons — help us to view these years more fully, and resist the binaried accounts of utilitarianism and Romanticism that run through early commentaries and subsequent scholarship. In fact, things were much less clearly defined. Such an approach reminds us that the imaginative arts were an integral part of the conception and practice of both the Westminster Review and Dr Birkbeck’s London Mechanics’ (later Literary and Scientific) Institution.