ABSTRACT
James Ward was quite jingoistic in his writing, rather oddly suggesting that Britons were superior to all other nations because they lived on an island. The Literary Gazette review which thought his book useful but reflected that ‘we cannot but fancy that a very strong national prejudice runs through all that author writes; he appears determined to see no merit in anything which is not English, and he too frequently hides or perverts a fact which may appear to him to prove the superiority of any foreign manufacture’. He wrote: ‘We excel in administering to ordinary wants and comforts of the world, but it must be confessed that our manufacturers and artisans are deficient in beauty of design, in high artistic conception and skill, as compared to the foreigner’. Instead of waiting in the labour market for the chance of being the lowest bidder for employment, he would go to the capital-market to find the highest bidder for his services’.
