Numbers have become, over the last two centuries, a central feature of public discourse and a privileged means of founding knowledge and trust in many walks of life. GNP, the unemployment rate, the consumer price index, life expectancy, crime rates, estimates of risk, concentration ratios, IQ and a host of other statistical devices are now part of our informational environment – one might say of the very fabric of our daily existence. There are few problems we would now consider examining, discussing and tackling without making use of numerical knowledge and without, therefore, resorting to the rhetoric of numbers. This continuous expansion of statistical artefacts can be described as a momentous epistemic transformation that has to a large degree displaced earlier authoritative forms of persuasion based on local and singular types of knowledge, often couched in literary form, with information of a more general and standardized character, generally presented in a numerical guise. But this transformation has also been political and institutional, in the sense that it has been made possible because of the ongoing increase in information-gathering activities carried on by governments and their agents from the early nineteenth century on. The harmonization of weights and measures, the cadastral survey of the national territory, the advent of periodical censuses, the setting up of standardized procedures to record the basic vital events of each individual's birth and death, all partake to this multi-faceted enterprise, under the conjoined and yet distinct legitimacies of modern science and of the modern state.

It has been convincingly argued that ‘statistics in its oldest, eighteenth-century sense was a description of the state, by and for itself ’, and that ‘during the early nineteenth century in France, England, and in Prussia, an administrative practice took shape around the word statistics, as did techniques of formalization centred on numbers’. This statement must, however, be qualified with regard to areas where, in contrast with the above-mentioned countries, the administrative and bureaucratic state was for all purposes absent during that period and where, as a consequence, political authorities had to content themselves with ‘meagre and unsatisfactory’ knowledge of the territory and its inhabitants. This was the case, namely, of British possessions and, during a half-century or so, from New South Wales to Upper Canada. In the absence of any regular census-taking activity on the part of colonial government, it fell on individual ‘gentlemen-statisticians’ to disseminate all information they could collect on the topography, history, population, economy, crafts and industry of the land. Techniques of formalization such as summing, averages, percentages and tables were introduced there in the writings of authors who practised a specific, now-defunct literary genre known as the statistical account.

The prototype that launched this kind of writing was Sir John Sinclair's twenty-one-volume Statistical Account of Scotland, published from 1790 to 1799.

Specific regions or localities can have immense drawing power. They may come to symbolize hope, opportunities for the future, freedom to move, flexibility, tolerance and innovation. The Bay Area played this role in the 1960s; but it did not just happen that way, it was a product of history. The Bay Area's radical tradition provided an essential framework for activists there, giving them a particular identity. Moreover, a powerful sense of place helped shape their political and cultural perspectives. The Bay Area constituted a critical venue for political and cultural dissent throughout the 1960s. San Francisco and Berkeley, in particular, pointed the way forward, signalled potentialities and drew many radicals from other regions into their orbits. Along the way, a cultural and political tendency, borne of the politics of space, marked out the Bay Area as different and injected radicalism there with a strong regional flavour.

Bay Area Exceptionalism

Regional differences within America make it difficult to speak of a national identity. It is not so much that there is no national identity but that it is structured regionally, experienced as a fractured sense of belonging to the whole. The same is true of the Movement. To a degree, the Movement was an accumulation of local organizations, circumstances and events rather than a coherent national movement. The relative geographical mobility of leaders and some participants did not lessen the extent to which a local identity could develop.

George Eliot's words in an 1856 essay on W. H. Riehl's Natural History of German Life provide an indicative starting point for this collection, encapsulating many of the myths and stereotypes that have typically dominated cultural ideas of rurality. Art and literature, Eliot argued, had long depicted a vision of rural life as a world of idyllic ploughmen, buxom maidens and rosy-faced children – a vision, she contended, that was far from the ‘truth of rustic life’: ‘no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry’.

If everything suggests that de Loutherbourg and O'Keefe were happily following their conjunction of personal interests in producing Omai, subsequent Pacific dramas following The Death of Captain Cook were largely noticeable by their absence from the London stage; the ones which were produced illustrate the transition of the region from a site of exploratory voyaging to the destination of penal and emigrant settlement. In less than fifty years, audiences were transferred from the compromised ethnography of Omai to Moncrieff's Surrey Theatre Van Diemen's Land! Or, Settlers and Natives (1830), a burletta complete with moving panorama of Hobart and intransigent aboriginal leader. In the interim, Kotzebue's Pacific-located La Perouse (1799) was probably subject to self-censorship at the two London royal theatres (who ultimately declined even to attempt to stage it) while a prospective production at Norwich Theatre Royal – even with Norwich's censored conclusion – was refused a license. As with Omai, once again pantomime became the preferred route to circumvent such state regulation as the censor suppressed any representation of Kotzebue's ideal Pacific colony with its remodeled social family. Nevertheless, the prospect of colonization and emigration quickly gave rise to misgivings about the region's suitability exclusively as a destination for penal transportation. Thomas John Dibdin's Drury Lane ‘Ballet of Action’, Pitcairn's Island (1816), with its resuscitated and mellowed figure of Fletcher Christian, was an important transitional drama, at once rehabilitating a mutineer but also making it clear that the Pacific contained viable sites for settlement.

The genesis of the so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism is well known. Although multifaceted and fragmented, feminist groups in Britain and the United States sought collectively to gain equal rights and privileges with men and to draw attention to myriad ways in which women continued to be oppressed by a patriarchal society. Betty Friedan's seminal text The Feminist Mystique, first published in 1963, is widely held as the inspiration that revitalized the feminist movement. At the centre of Friedan's thesis was a critique of the popular notion that truly ‘feminine’ women could gain complete fulfilment from the domestic role. Friedan noted that ‘millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands good-bye in front of the picture window’. Friedan of course, was by no means the first to confront the stifling confinement of marriage and motherhood. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, described her descent into despair in her autobiographical journal The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892. In this narrative, she wrote about her experience of nervous depression and the way in which she was prescribed enforced passivity and ‘forbidden to work’ until she was well again.

This is the story of rural white unwed mothers from Maine and Tennessee who, beginning in the 1870s, took advantage of the increased access to urban areas to find opportunities and support not available in their own communities. Although Maine and Tennessee differed in their economic and political structures, the rural communities from which these women came were remarkably similar. Isolated, rural communities everywhere in the United States shared a reliance on family and community that required hard work and neighbourliness. While men were by custom and law the heads of their households, women and children were valued for their labour, without which the family could not survive.

Between 1870 and 1950 the support and control of unwed mothers in the United States shifted from local communities to a network of social work professionals who counselled single pregnant women in more than 200 unwed mothers homes. Where once young women were kept in line by the oversight of older women who offered assistance but who also paid attention to any form of deviant behaviour, by 1950 trained professionals met with young women under conditions of extreme privacy and offered them choice but also emphasized the best interest of the child. Women in the late nineteenth century were likely to live with, or in close proximity to, their children born out of wedlock; women in the mid-twentieth century were as likely to give their children up to adoption and renounce any attempt to contact them again.

Although Jane Eyre begins by proclaiming that she ‘never liked long walks’, one of the most peculiar and memorable episodes of Jane Eyre (1847) finds the novel's heroine fleeing Thornfield to wander the English countryside, nearly perishing of exposure and hunger. This episode is notable not only for its drama, or for the irony of the once-indoorsy Jane's situation, but in that Jane nearly dies in the midst of the very natural world that has been strongly and repeatedly used to characterize her as something more (or less) than human herself. Throughout the novel Jane shows an innate sensitivity to and association with the natural world, and particularly in the interviews with Rochester that immediately precede her crisis, Jane is described in terms that are far more wild and nature-based than human. Her flight from Thornfield and her subsequent wandering, however, throw this natural characterization into a deadly crisis. Jane nearly dies of exposure; the poetic language that had turned her into a creature of nature is swiftly undermined, and any romance in Rochester's characterization of Jane as a bird is undone when, starving, she eats porridge meant for a pig.

Jane's affiliation with nature is not simply a romantic fantasy imposed by Rochester: entwined throughout Jane's turn to nature and her traumatic experience in it are practical questions of her own economic status.

In 1866, Charles Kingsley published Hereward the Wake: Last of the English, a quasi-historical novel based on the life of an eleventh-century Anglo-Danish outlaw and his last stand against William the Conqueror's Norman incursion into England. Described by Graham Swift as a ‘fenland fabulist’, Kingsley opens his text with a prelude dedicated to the novel's setting, the lowlands of East Anglia. Read as a defence of the Fens against the domination of highland spaces within romantic and historical literature, Kingsley's preface usefully represents the bifurcation of British rurality, a division based on gradient. But his championing of East Anglia is partial. While the nineteenth-century flatlands were drained, cultivated and effectively tamed by engineers and agriculturists – a process initiated formally in the seventeenth century – Kingsley's medieval fens are a morass of marshlands and Dark Age superstition.

Although Philip de Loutherbourg's and John O'Keefe's Omai, or, A Trip Round the World (1785) has received greater critical attention, it was the ‘Grand Serious-Pantomimic-Ballet’ of The Death of Captain Cook (1789) which became the dominant theatrical entertainment mediating the British encounter with the South Seas. The Death of Captain Cook was the most popular of the Pacific dramas, with the largest audiences and, for this reason, it will be examined first. The chapter will then proceed to subdivide the sequence of Covent Garden's Omai productions in order to discuss the implications of its licensed and unlicensed texts, and then to arrive, finally, at the minimal copy as licensed (without its subtitle), which was the format performed before the fewest number of people. The chapter will discriminate between stage business and scenery specific to Omai and that which was common to other pantomimes, including previous productions at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Just as Covent Garden's Death of Captain Cook used scenery recycled from Omai, so too Omai had borrowed scenery from earlier productions. Despite its enthusiastic uptake in the provinces and in circus-like arenas, The Death of Captain Cook probably represents the purer generic form, since Omai was not only produced at Covent Garden in the midst of censorship, but was also situated within rapidly developing conventions of English pantomime, distanced from its Commedia dell'Arte origins. Not only were Omai and The Death of Captain Cook the outcome of this intricate series of theatrical considerations, European voyagers' experiences of Pacific theatricality may also have been formative in attracting Western playwrights to the subject.