One of the many debates that the recent change in government has precipitated in Australia is a discussion about the responsibility of the present generation for the attitudes and events of the past. The Prime Minister, John Howard, has made his opinion clear: he insists that he and his government are concerned with forging the future, and should not be held back by recrimination and guilt. A propensity to dissociate the future from the past is a common conservative phenomenon. I would argue that it has its roots within the need of the economic elites of Western industrial society to control popular conceptualisations of time. It suited the governing classes to foster a sense that the march of human achievement would bring a better future, a secularized version of what the Christian churches promised. As a result the role of prophecy and prediction, once a vital part of popular culture, became increasingly unrespectable. Prediction was inevitably founded on what was already known; once the future became the domain of the new, there was, of course, less that could actually be said about it. The success of attempts to limit discourse about the future was an important part of the creation of modern, rational understandings of time. John Howard's belief that the strength of present-day intentionality can in some way transcend the traces of the past is a familiar motif in nineteenth-century commentary anxious to convince a working populace that the future would indeed be a better place.

The way in which industrialisation and urbanisation transformed concepts of the present has been widely discussed, often as part of a history of the development of timekeeping. Historians have described the growing tyranny of the clock over factory workers, and have argued that time-consciousness was increasingly internalised as the ownership of a watch became a status symbol, and as punctuality became a vital component of independent respectability.1 The concept of progress has also been explored as part of the history of ideas.2 What has not yet been critically examined is the way in which popular concepts of the future were transformed. The belief that the future could be seen was not simply a remnant of irrational belief. Its continuing strength in popular culture was demonstrated in demands that the newly established Meteorological Department should include weather prediction as one of its functions.3 Indeed, the difference between scientific prediction (planning) and 'superstitious' prediction (prophecy) was not always easy to discern. In the negotiation of the indistinct territory between these two ways of speaking about the future, the role of concepts of time in formulating the definition of rationality can be examined.

Surviving chapbooks of prediction and fortune-telling suggest a popular belief that it was possible to jump time and to see the future. Such a belief would have posited a temporal flow which, contrary to Newton's definition, was not equable, and would have made the outcome of scientific experiment undependable. It would also have thrown an unquantifiable factor into forward planning. Reinhart Koselleck writes: 'Since the future of modern history opens itself as the unknown, it becomes plannable - it must be planned. With each new plan a fresh degree of uncertainty is introduced, since it presupposes a lack of experience'.4 Such an increase in expectation, in anticipation of difference, actually limits what can be said with certainty about the future, but this diminishing scenario of the future was precisely what was required for the rise of the new discourse of statistics, a rational method of forecasting rather than predicting.

In order for statistics to achieve hegemony over forward planning, it was necessary for other long existing modes of prediction to be replaced. Foremost among these was weather astrology, or astro-meteorology, and I have described elsewhere the struggle between rational weather forecasting and astro-meteorology during the 1860s.5 However, there were other widespread predictive techniques. Dream books, a form of chapbook which offered interpretations of what dreams presaged for the future, were a regular feature of the street-seller's literature. In the mid-nineteenth century the radical writer James Guest outlined the usual range of the wares carried by hawkers, who

'sold at what they could get ... when they could get the blind side of the old dame or the young one with their Pamphlets, Books of Dreams, fortune telling, Nixon's prophecies, books of fate, ballads, etc.'6

It is impossible to tell how well dream books sold, but Guest's placement of them as first on his list of chapbooks (after pamphlets, by which he probably meant political pamphlets) suggests some importance.

Dream books depended on a commonly accepted code of meanings. To dream of an oak tree is a sign of long life and riches; to dream about beer portends an accident; to dream of beef denotes the death of a friend or relation. In fact, beef is regarded as a decidedly unhappy choice for a dream, always leading to death. In all cases, the dreams bring messages about the future, a future that may be quite sudden, unexpected, and unwarranted. Dream books also carried a section of interpretation of moles on the body. Moles denoted character, carrying the implication that character is destiny. The Golden Dreamer of 1840, for example, writes that a mole on the left side of the mouth denotes vanity and pride, and that this will lead to unlawful offspring to provide for.7 These chapbooks, then, were a genre that suggested in two ways that the future could be foretold: first in direct revelation through the vision of a dream, and secondly through the ascertaining of character which would inevitably lead to certain consequences. By the end of the century, such literature was regarded with amused scorn, although Freud appropriated some of its terminology and methodology in The Interpretation of Dreams. He used a set of symbolic meanings that was in some ways very similar to the dream books' code of interpretation, but refocused the significance of dreaming to concentrate on its revelation of the past rather than the future.

Fortune-telling books, unlike the more passive interpretation of dreams and moles, involved action on the part of the believer. It was necessary either to fabricate an oracle, as in the random drawing of lines on a chart or the special pouring of tea and coffee to reveal the patterns left by dregs, or to observe a particular ritual, such as turning your nightgown inside out before you went to sleep. Fortune-telling books relate more explicitly to time measurement than either dreaming or weather forecasting, in that they often contained lists of special meanings attached to particular days of the year. Lucky and unlucky days were listed, days propitious to the characters of children born on them, days suitable for travelling. One volume of 1850, for example, contains a list of the 'perilous' days for that year, saying that 'on these days if a man or woman let blood, they shall die within twenty-one days following; and whosoever falleth sick on any one of these days shall certainly die; and whosoever beginneth any journey on any of these days, he shall be in danger of death before he returns. Also he that marrieth a wife on any of these days, they shall either be quickly parted, or else live together with sorrow and discontent'. There is perhaps a more obvious relationship between fortune-telling of this nature and economic demands, since a belief in ill-omened days might well discourage initiative or even work.

Although the above predictive practices certainly have important differences, and though opposition to each might come from different quarters, I would still want to draw some threads of commonality. Peter Burke suggests that the 17th century reform of popular culture included a reform of prophecy, in which the once popular predictions of Merlin and Joachim de Fiore began to arouse educated scorn.8 Yet clearly the practices I have indicated (weather prophecy, dream interpretation, and fortune-telling) survived seventeenth century reform, and were thriving for much of the ninteenth century. Yet all three 'survivals' had virtually disappeared by the beginning of the twentieth century, to lie dormant until something of a revival in the 1930s by newspaper columnists giving voice to a new occultism. What was it about late nineteenth century developments that finally drove these very deeply entrenched popular practices under cover or out of existence altogether? Part of the answer, at least, is the nineteenth century disapproval of prediction of the future.

Claiming to predict the future had, in fact, been illegal since 1736. The Vagrancy Act, which made it an offence to claim to be able to tell fortunes, went through various revisions throughout the eighteenth century. All based their proscription on the assumption that to 'pretend ... to tell fortunes' was a form of fraud. By 1824 the updated Act listed fortune-telling first in a long list of offences which were punishable by a fine or by three months' imprisonment. Its new prominence suggests increased concern about prediction, possibly connected with attempts to control gypsy travellers; but among the Act's casualties were also middle-class astrologers, such as Francis Copestick, who in 1852 was trapped by a policeman masquerading as a client and was sentenced to a month's imprisonment with hard labour. Prosecutions were probably few, and I would guess that threat of prosecution was generally sufficient to contain fortune-telling practices. Records such as the following, from the 'Monthly Obituary' of the European Magazine of 1815, are rare:

At Yarmouth, Norfolk, aged 50. Mrs. Holland. Her death was occasioned by being frightened by Mrs Spaul, a pretended fortune-teller who has since been committed to gaol as a vagrant.'9

In sum, then, I am suggesting that speculation about the future, especially the long distant future, was suppressed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century both by overt government policies and by more subtle cultural imperatives. The conceptualisation of the future was a matter in which the governing elites were closely interested, perhaps connected with a desire to escape from the narrow parameters of the past, from exemplary historical experience, and from the deterministic universe of fortune-telling. When accelerated change was the criterion by which civilisation and progress were measured, in contrast with the apparently unchanging peoples of Empire (the supposedly 'timeless', or allochronic, races such as Australian Aborigines), then it was important to advance a view of the future as open to planning and opportunity.

A view of the future as totally under rational control, neatly planned by statistical forecasting, has perhaps never been entirely subscribed to by governments of industrial societies. Nevertheless, the marginalising of popular beliefs about the aberrant behaviour of the future may have lessened society's ability to factor in the unexpected. Certainly the nineteenth-century concept of progress is widely accepted as responsible for a mood of bitter disillusionment following the first world war. In promoting a version of the future that is entirely each generation's responsibility, in underestimating the structural limitations imposed on choice, and in minimising the traces of the past, modern versions of rational time perhaps do less to prepare society for change than did once dire predictions of the baleful effects of comets and eclipses.

Notes

1. E. P. Thompson, 'Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism', Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-97; David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

2. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Frankfurt am Main, 1979; trans. Keith Tribe, Cambridge, Mass., 1985); David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, Conn., 1990).

3. Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775-1870 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 197-230.

4. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 35.

5. Perkins, Visions pp. 197-230.

6. James Guest, 'A Free Press, and How it Became Free', in W. Hutton, The History of Birmingham (Birmingham, 1861), quoted in Joel H. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969), p. 17.

7. The Golden Dreamer or Dreamers' Interpreter (Newcastle on Tyne, 1840).

8. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1976).

9. European Magazine v. 68, July-Dec p. 374. My thanks to Richard Goulden for this reference.

Maureen Perkins has been teaching History in several Australian Universities. She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Her book Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775-1870 Oxford: Oxford University Press, was launched in November 1996.

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