IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 303

The Reform Act of 1832 is often remembered as the beginning of modern British politics, but to many working people it was a bitter disappointment. The Act swept away some of the worst anomalies in the representation of towns and counties, and it gave the vote to a large part of the middle classes. The great majority of working men, however, remained excluded, because the franchise still depended on owning or renting property of a certain value. In the industrial towns, where overcrowded housing and low wages were commonplace, the sense of being shut out of political life was sharp, and radical newspapers kept the argument alive.

The organisation behind the movement's programme was the London Working Men's Association, founded in 1836 by a small group of artisans and middle-class sympathisers. Its leading figures included William Lovett, a self-educated cabinetmaker, and Francis Place, a tailor whose workshop had become a meeting point for reformers. Their aim was not revolution but a careful, legally drafted reform of Parliament, and in May 1838 they published their proposals as The People's Charter.

It contained six demands: the vote for every adult man, voting by secret ballot, and the abolition of the property qualification that kept poor men out of the Commons. MPs were also to be paid, constituencies were to be of roughly equal size, and a general election was to be held every year.

Each point addressed a grievance that Chartists knew from daily experience. Without a secret ballot, a tenant could be evicted or a worker dismissed for voting against the wishes of his landlord or employer. Only men with an independent income could afford to sit in the House of Commons, so the working class had no direct voice there. The rapidly growing manufacturing towns were represented far less generously than the small rural boroughs, some of which had hardly any voters at all. Annual elections, it was argued, would keep MPs answerable to the people who elected them. The Charter confined itself to political demands, which allowed reformers with different economic views to unite.

The first petition in support of the Charter was assembled in 1838 and presented to the Commons by Thomas Attwood, a veteran MP, in the summer of 1839. It was said to carry well over a million signatures. Parliament refused to consider it and rejected the motion by a large majority, while the government arrested a number of leading Chartists. The movement then began to divide between those who trusted in peaceful persuasion — the 'moral force' wing associated with Lovett — and those who believed that only the threat of physical force would frighten the ruling classes into surrender.

Matters came to a head in south Wales in November 1839. John Frost, a prosperous draper who had been mayor of Newport, led several thousand miners and ironworkers on the town, many of them armed with pikes and clubs. They believed that a mass demonstration would compel the authorities to release imprisoned Chartists. At the Westgate Hotel, soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Around twenty people were killed, and Frost and two companions were sentenced to death; after enormous public protest the sentence was commuted to transportation to Australia.

Between the first and second petitions the most conspicuous figure in the movement was Feargus O'Connor, an Irish landowner and barrister. His weekly newspaper, the Northern Star, reached tens of thousands of readers and helped to give Chartists a sense of national identity. Energetic and unpredictable, O'Connor also promoted the National Land Company, a scheme into which subscribers paid small sums in the hope of receiving a cottage and a few acres of land. Unlike the Charter, the land plan offered a practical escape from industrial wages, and it attracted thousands before it was wound up in 1851.

A second petition, presented by the MP Thomas Duncombe in 1842, was reported to bear more than three million names, and it was rejected as firmly as the first. That summer a wave of strikes spread through the manufacturing districts of northern England, but the authorities held firm. In the following years the movement lost momentum: several leaders had been imprisoned or transported, and funds were short. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 also weakened the alliance of radicals.

The last great show of strength came in 1848, when revolutions on the continent alarmed the British government. A mass meeting was called for 10 April on Kennington Common, and tens of thousands of special constables were sworn in. O'Connor, warned that the crowd would not be allowed to cross the Thames in procession, agreed to abandon the march, and the petition was carried to Westminster in three cabs. Its supporters claimed nearly six million signatures; a Commons committee found fewer than two million genuine ones, along with many duplicates and invented names. Ridicule did more damage than any law.

The Charter's six points were eventually enacted, one by one, over the following eighty years. The property qualification disappeared in 1858, the secret ballot arrived in 1872, constituencies were made more equal in 1885, and MPs began to be paid in 1911. Universal male suffrage came in 1918. Only annual parliaments were never adopted. Historians still disagree about the movement's significance. Some regard it as the first genuinely mass political movement of the industrial age, while others emphasise its internal quarrels and its failure to achieve a single aim while it was active.

Before mechanical refrigeration, ice was a seasonal luxury that only the wealthy could enjoy, cut from ponds in winter and stored deep underground until the summer. In the nineteenth century, however, a small group of entrepreneurs turned that luxury into an international business. Ice was harvested in New England, carried across the equator in sailing ships, sold in the markets of Calcutta and Rio de Janeiro, and stored in brick-lined wells beneath the streets of London. For some seventy years natural ice was shipped around the world in enormous quantities, and the industry left behind a network of half-forgotten buildings, business records and scholarly disputes.

The trade's unlikely pioneer was Frederic Tudor, the son of a prosperous Boston family. In 1806 he shipped a cargo of ice from Boston to the Caribbean island of Martinique, convinced that planters would pay well for it in a climate where a cold drink was almost unknown. The venture lost money, because no one had thought to build an ice house at the destination and much of the cargo melted on the quay. Tudor persisted, learning to insulate his cargo and to prepare storage before he sailed, and he eventually made a fortune. His ships later carried ice to Havana and, from 1833, to Calcutta, where the ice that survived a voyage of four months was sold at a very high price.

The ice itself came from ponds and small lakes around Boston, above all Fresh Pond and, a little later, Wenham Lake. Harvesting began when the ice was thick enough to bear a horse, usually in January, and it was done with astonishing speed. A workforce of hundreds cut, dragged and stacked the crop in a few weeks, working by lamplight when the days were short. In 1825 Nathaniel Wyeth, who managed Tudor's ice houses, invented a horse-drawn cutter that scored the surface into a grid of uniform blocks. The blocks could then be broken off with a bar and floated to the shore. Wyeth's device cut the cost of harvesting by a large margin and made the trade viable on a large scale.

Ice was stored at the water's edge in ice houses: thick-walled buildings, often with a cavity between two walls, insulated with sawdust and drained so that meltwater ran away instead of hastening the thaw. Sawdust, a waste product of the sawmills, proved the ideal packing material, both in these buildings and between the blocks loaded into a ship's hold. Even so, losses were considerable, and few firms recorded them accurately. On a long voyage a large part of the cargo might melt, and the profits of a shipment depended on the skill of the men who stowed the ice and on the weather they met.

Britain, with a damp climate and no reliable winter ice of its own, was an eager customer. Norwegian ice, cut from lakes near the coast and shipped across the North Sea, was being sold in London by the 1820s. From the 1840s American ice from Wenham Lake was marketed in the capital as exceptionally pure, and a shop on the Strand supplied households that had never before owned an ice box. Carlo Gatti, a Swiss-born entrepreneur who began by selling ice cream from a stall, built large underground ice wells beside the Regent's Canal in the 1850s. Two of these wells survive beneath the London Canal Museum, and their brick arches are among the few substantial remains of the trade in Britain.

Ice changed what people ate and drank. It made possible the commercial trade in ice cream, the fashion for iced drinks and, in the United States, a whole culture of mixed drinks served cold. Brewers used it to cool fermentation in warm weather, fishmongers and butchers used it to keep their stock fresh, and hospitals used it to bring down fever and to cool the air of sickrooms. Because the poorest households could not afford it, ice was at first a sign of status. The spread of the cheap domestic ice box in American cities in the 1870s and 1880s brought iced water within reach of clerks and shopkeepers for the first time.

The trade collapsed with surprising speed. Mechanical refrigeration, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, allowed breweries and meatpackers to make their own cold, and refrigerated ships began carrying meat from Argentina and Australia to Europe. Ice harvesters also faced difficulties of their own: mild winters produced thin crops, and ponds near the cities were increasingly polluted by sewage and industrial waste. Historians have argued about which of these pressures mattered most. Some treat the trade as a victim of superior technology, while others point out that the business had been in difficulties for years before artificial cold became cheap, and that a trade dependent on the weather was always going to be insecure.

What survives of the trade is fragmentary. Ice houses stand on country estates, sometimes mistaken for dovecotes or smugglers' hiding places. Ledgers, cargo manifests and the advertisements of ice companies allow economic historians to reconstruct prices and routes, while the tools of the harvesters, the long saws and the horse-drawn cutters, sit in local museums. Because few firms kept complete records, the picture is patchy, and much of what we know about the trade depends on the account books of a handful of large dealers. The ice itself, of course, left nothing at all behind.

A visitor arriving at a great cathedral or a famous painting today is likely to meet a small notice: no flash, no tripods, no selfie sticks. At some sites the rules are far stricter, and cameras are forbidden altogether. The disagreement behind these notices is worth taking seriously, because it sets two things that most people value against each other: the duty to preserve fragile objects for the future, and the right of the public to see, record and share them.

The conservation argument is more complicated than it looks. Light of any kind damages certain materials, and the harm is cumulative. A watercolour that is exposed to a strong lamp for a few seconds suffers very little, but a million such exposures are another matter. Conservators usually distinguish between the total dose of light an object receives and the intensity of any single flash. On that reasoning, a ban on flash is sensible in rooms containing pigments, textiles, feathers or manuscripts. Ordinary handheld photography, which adds no light of its own, is a different proposition. Several major museums have reached exactly this conclusion, permitting photographs without flash in most of their galleries.

Where the building itself is the artefact, the calculation changes. The painted caves of Lascaux in France were closed to visitors in 1963, after algae and then a white crystalline growth began to spread across the walls, encouraged by the warmth, moisture and carbon dioxide of thousands of human visitors. Other decorated caves, including Altamira in Spain, have been opened only to small numbers of visitors on strictly limited days. In such places the argument is not really about cameras at all. It is about whether people should be admitted, and a ban on photography is a small part of a much wider restriction.

Money is the second strand of the debate. Museums and historic houses have long earned income by licensing photographs of the objects they own and by selling postcards and guidebooks. Curators sometimes add that they lose control of how their collections are represented once anyone may photograph them. Against this, the experience of institutions that have abandoned restrictions is instructive. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which allows photography throughout its galleries, has encouraged visitors to share what they see, treating this as free publicity rather than theft. For most sites, the revenue lost through permitted photography appears modest, while the goodwill gained is considerable.

The third argument concerns crowds rather than light. A group of visitors who stop to compose a photograph in a narrow gallery obstructs everyone behind them, and the effect is worse in small rooms with a single famous object. Tripods, which were once the mark of the serious amateur, are now forbidden almost everywhere, partly because they trip people up and partly because setting one up can take minutes. Selfie sticks are banned for similar reasons. None of this is an argument against photography as such; it is an argument for managing circulation, and timed entry, one-way routes and staff who move people along do the job at least as well as a ban.

The fourth argument is psychological. Anyone who has watched a crowd in front of a celebrated painting has seen people look at it chiefly through a screen. There is respectable evidence that photographing an experience reduces the attention we give to it. In one widely cited experiment, visitors to a museum were asked to photograph some exhibits and merely observe others; a week later they remembered fewer details about the objects they had photographed. Other studies point the other way, showing that taking a photograph can help people to recall an event later, particularly when they have deliberately chosen what to include in the frame. The evidence, in short, does not support a blanket ban.

Behind all these practical questions lies a question of principle. Heritage that is held in public ownership, or by charities on behalf of the public, is arguably something that people are entitled to record. Photographs taken by visitors circulate on social media and reach audiences that no museum advertisement could hope to find, and for people who cannot travel, the images are the only access they will ever have. Restrictions can also look paternalistic when they are imposed on adults who are perfectly capable of behaving sensibly. The principle has limits, however: at a working monastery, a mosque or a site where a community still buries its dead, photographing people at prayer or at a graveside is a different matter from photographing a painting, and consent, not conservation, is the relevant test.

My own view is that blanket prohibitions are the wrong instrument. Flash harms certain objects and should be banned wherever light-sensitive material is on display. Tripods obstruct other people and should go. Professional shoots, which may involve lights, cables and hours of exclusive access, need a permit and a fee. Beyond that, a general prohibition achieves little and costs a good deal, since it sets staff against visitors and makes the collection feel like property rather than a shared inheritance. Where a site is genuinely fragile — a painted cave, a room of manuscripts, a small chapel whose walls are flaking — restrictions should be absolute, and nobody should apologise for them.

The question, then, is not whether visitors should be allowed to take photographs but what kind of attention a place deserves. A camera is not the enemy of that attention, and the notice on the door tells us a good deal about how a site understands its visitors.