The Stanhopes were earls, inventors and eccentrics – one built an unpickable press, another gave his name to a magnifying lens
The Stanhope Arms is a pub near Gloucester Road with two thousand seven hundred and forty-four reviews and a 4.2 – a large and solid sample – and it is named after the Stanhope family, aristocrats who turn out to be far more interesting than most: a dynasty of earls, inventors, radicals and eccentrics.
The aristocratic inventors
The Stanhopes were the Earls Stanhope, an old English noble family – but unlike most aristocratic pub names, this one leads somewhere genuinely fascinating, because several Stanhopes were serious inventors and scientists, not merely landowners.
The third Earl Stanhope, Charles Stanhope, was a remarkable figure of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – a politician, yes, but above all an inventor and man of science. He was a radical in politics, sympathetic to the French Revolution, so fierce in his principles that he was nicknamed “Citizen Stanhope” and stripped the coronets and heraldry from his gates. And he invented, constantly.
The Stanhope press
His most important invention was the Stanhope press – the first printing press with an iron frame, replacing the wooden presses that had been used, essentially unchanged, since Gutenberg three and a half centuries earlier. The iron construction allowed larger sheets to be printed with less effort and greater precision, and it was a genuine advance in printing technology, helping to power the explosion of cheap print in the nineteenth century.
Crucially, Stanhope refused to patent it, believing the improvement should be freely available to all – a striking act of principle from a man who could have profited handsomely. The Stanhope press spread widely and influenced printing for decades. An aristocrat who invented a better printing press and then gave it to the world for free is not what one expects to find behind a pub sign.
The Stanhope lens
The family name attached itself to another invention too: the Stanhope lens, a simple, powerful magnifying lens. In the nineteenth century, these tiny lenses were used to create “Stanhopes” – novelty objects containing a microscopic photograph that could be viewed through the little lens, hidden in charms, pens, jewellery and souvenirs. For a while they were a hugely popular Victorian novelty, and they preserved tiny images – of tourist sights, of loved ones, sometimes of things rather less respectable – for the curious to peer at.
So the Stanhope name is stamped on both a serious advance in printing and a charming Victorian optical novelty – a family that genuinely contributed to how images and words were reproduced and viewed.
The other Stanhopes
The family produced other notable figures, including Lady Hester Stanhope, the third earl’s niece – one of the great eccentric travellers of the age, who abandoned England for the Middle East, adopted local dress, led an expedition to the ancient ruins of Palmyra, and set herself up as a kind of queen in a remote monastery in the mountains of what is now Lebanon, where she died in grand, deluded isolation. The Stanhopes did not do things by halves.
The pub
A solid, popular pub doing a fair 4.2 across a large and real sample of nearly three thousand people. It carries the name of one of the more genuinely interesting aristocratic families in England – inventors, radicals and eccentrics rather than mere landowners.
Verdict
Solid, popular, and named after a family that gave the world an iron printing press, a magnifying lens, and one of history’s great eccentric travellers.
Have a pint, and raise it to Citizen Stanhope, the radical earl who invented a better printing press and then refused, on principle, to make a penny from it.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Read this in an actual planning meeting and the satire immediately becomes documentation with better narrative structure and humor.
British satire requires that you’re in on the joke and also completely serious. This nails it.