Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture Research Papers (original) (raw)

The character and reputation of Frederick, prince of Wales, have long divided historians. His apparently piecemeal efforts at opposition have been dismissed as lacking in focus, while his mercurial character and early demise have left him difficult to assess. The aim of this article is to attempt once more to reappraise the Prince both as a man at the head of a specific political interest but also more broadly as the symbolic figurehead of a wider patriot movement within society. Through analysis of the contemporary press, and of some of the key members of the Prince's own household, this essay will argue that Prince Frederick was more than just a figurehead for the patriots, if impeded by circumstances and occasionally distracted by his own protean tendencies.

- by michelle orihel
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- Intellectual History, Print Culture, History of Ideas, Book History

This chapter analyses a caricature, produced in 1753 by the watercolourist Paul Sandby entitled Burlesque sur le Burlesque. This caricature attacks the painter William Hogarth, in particular, his recently published aesthetic treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, and his stance in the English Academic debates of the 1750s – a series of events in which English artists debated whether or not they should migrate from private artistic academies to publicly funded and hierarchically organised arts academies on the continental model. The chapter explores the way in which Sandby targets his object, and through iconographical analysis, demonstrates how caricature operates visually as a literal puzzle that forefronts certain criticisms, and veils others.

(The Georgian Underworld: Criminal Subcultures in Eighteenth-Century England; Chapter 16) One of the most interesting subjects in the history of sexuality is the sudden appearance, three hundred years ago, of a well organized gay subculture in the city of London. This was patronized by homosexual men who used gay slang, who frequented gay cruising areas, and who engaged in camp or effeminate behaviour amongst themselves. Even from the very beginning of the century, sodomites frequented a network of gay pubs, where they socialized with one another, singing and dancing together, and otherwise behaving in a disorderly fashion. The legal records cover a wide range of circumstantial details beyond sexual activity, and often give us an interesting glimpse into the social life of the sodomite.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of a new poetic genre, the “work” poem which took various forms of labor as its subject and was often written by laborers themselves. Several of these working class poets found their lives transformed due to the success of their verse (Stephen Duck most famously), but most faded into literary obscurity. However, a substantial body of “work” poems was produced by a diverse group of poets throughout the century, each manifesting divergent concerns and attitudes about the experience of work. This chapter assesses the formal connections uniting this poetic genre, particularly the frequent use of such literary devices as ironic distancing, litotes, and mock-georgic description. Instead of solely classifying “work” poems on the basis of their subject matter, this chapter demonstrates that such poetry (indeed the genre itself) lends itself to sophisticated literary techniques often associated with other poetic genres. In this fashion the full measure of eighteenth-century working class poetry can be evaluated more fairly, particularly by analyzing the formation of a new genre designed expressly by the poets themselves. The chapter ultimately seeks to demonstrate the connectedness, rather than the alienation, of working class poetry to the eighteenth-century British poetic tradition.

- by Corey Andrews
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- Critical Theory, British Literature, Scottish Literature, English Literature

Following the appointment of its first aristocratic Grand Masters in the 1720s and in the wake of its connections to the scientific Enlightenment, ‘Free and Accepted’ Masonry rapidly became part of Britain’s national profile and the largest and arguably the most influential of Britain’s extensive clubs and societies. The new organisation did not evolve naturally from the mediaeval guilds and religious orders that pre-dated it, but was reconfigured radically by a largely self-appointed inner core. Freemasonry became a vehicle for the expression and transmission of the political and religious views of those at its centre and for the scientific Enlightenment concepts that they championed. It also offered a channel through which many sought to realise personal aspirations - social, intellectual and financial.

Distortion is the moment at which the physical means of transmitting a text irrupt into a reader's experience of it. I will discuss distortion here as a phenomenon occurring in printed materials, but I do not wish to exclude other recognisable instances such as static in a radio signal, or white noise on a cathode-ray-tube television screen. To speak of distortion as an impairment, however, is to confirm the Platonic priority of another book-object. As textual scholars have shown, locating this authoritative ur-text can be, to say the least, difficult. Distortion is not a condition befalling individual textual artefacts (‘book-objects’) here and there: there is no non-distorted reading. In fact, a belief in non-distorted reading amounts to believing in pure, transparent mediation that leaves no trace of itself on the mediated. Leaving aside for the purposes of this essay the profound political implications of placing the labour of mediation under erasure, I will offer here a heuristic of distortion. Absent such a heuristic, ‘distorted’ book-objects and their texts will always be treated as degraded derivatives. The corollary of that treatment is to elevate an unknown, possibly non-existent ur-text to a position of unimpeachable authority, and to degrade both the experience of reading and of the embodied text and reader. We can solve the problem of distortion by placing the irreducible phenomenological singularity of the book-object at the centre of our experience of a text. This is existential reading: you are reading what you are reading and not anything else.

This essay is about the astronomical focus of Joseph Wright's 1766 painting of an orrery

Review by Ros Ballaster, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37: 544–545.

This study is devoted to the emergence, the characteristics and the function of the London Clubs, which were a key feature of eighteenth-century London life. Their growth, parallel to the advent of the coffee-house, of the press, and to urban development, mirrored an evolution of sociability. Those spaces for male conviviality, private, exclusive and somehow elitist, entered their golden age from the 1730s onwards. The pleasures of eating, conversation and gambling, enjoyed by their members, diffused new values, definite norms of savoir-vivre and good taste, designed for the English gentleman. The club was both an instrument of integration and exclusion, half way between the private and public spheres. An exclusive male world, in which refinement and excess coexisted, that institution could be considered either as an anteroom of power, promoting free and constructive debate, or as a centre of plots and subversion. As such, the club seems to embody the paradoxes of the English nation and appears, in this respect, as a form of sociability unique in itself.

This is the first comparative study of a highly unlikely group of authors: eighteenth-century women peasants in England, Scotland, and Germany, women who, as a rule, received little or no formal education and lived by manual labor, many of them in dire poverty. Among them are the English washerwoman Mary Collier, the English domestic servants Elizabeth Hands and Molly Leapor, the German cowherd Anna Louisa Karsch, the Scottish diarywoman Janet Little, the Scottish domestic servant Christian Milne, and the English milkmaid Ann Cromartie Yearsley. Their literature is here linked with one of the major eighteenth-century aesthetic trends in all three countries, the Natural Genius craze, which culminated in highland primitivism in Scotland and England, and in the Sturm und Drang in Germany. Kord's analysis of the peasant women's works and the bourgeois response enables us to find new answers to questions that have centrally influenced our thinking about what makes art Art. Kord's book provides a fresh look at some of this fascinating literature, and at the roles and attitudes of the lower classes and of women in the Art world of the day. It also advances a revolutionary thesis: that the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant cultural class not primarily, as is commonly held, in opposition to aristocratic culture, but more importantly through its dissociation from and suppression of lower-class art forms.

- by Susanne Kord
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- Scottish Literature, German Studies, German Literature, English Literature

Fancy in the eighteenth century was part of a rich semantic network, connecting wit, whimsicality, erotic desire, spontaneity, deviation from norms and triviality. It was also a contentious term, signifying excess, oddness and irrationality, liable to offend taste, reason and morals. This chapter on fancy in drawing manuals is part of the Voltaire Foundation - Liverpool University Press - Oxford University Studies in The Enlightenment book Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture edited by Melissa Percival and Muriel Adrien

- by Bénédicte Miyamoto
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- Art History, Reception Studies, British History, Book History
- by Joshua Ehrlich
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- Intellectual History, Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, History of Ideas

This article on the American Revolution was published in AGORA, the magazine of the Victorian History Teachers Association.

Commercial Modernity and Moral Multiplicity in Humphry Clinker In his novel Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett engages in a traditionalist's ethical evaluation of commercial modernity. Predominantly focalizing his narrative through the conservative squire Matt Bramble, Smollett articulates a reactionary fear of an emergent economic doctrine that he believes perverts the English socio-moral landscape. Principally, Smollett uses his text to express revulsion for an individualistic mercantilism that promotes self-indulgence over social welfare. But the novel cannot be circumscribed as a unified, single-minded critique against contemporary capitalism. Both generically and structurally, Humphry Clinker is a layered text that engenders and accommodates a multiplicity of contradicting perspectives. Utilizing the heterogeneous schemes of travel writing and polyphonic narration, Smollett represents an ambiguous conception of the mercantile. The plural nature of these literary devices enables him to engage in countervailing analyzes of capitalism, recognizing

My subject is Joseph Priestley in the 1770s, and his place in the later Enlightenment. If any one figure stands for the Enlightenment in England it is Priestley, ‘the Voltaire of Unitarianism’, as Hazlitt styled him. There are many aspects to this decade of intellectual adventurousness. Philosophically, he takes up the case for materialism and attacks what he calls ‘the hypothesis of the soul’. He defends the determinism to which he has always subscribed. And he meets both Humean scepticism and Reid’s Common Sense position with a version of scientific realism fashioned after Locke. Politically, he began to attack the English aristocracy and clerical establishment, which he sees as hostile to liberty and toleration. Theologically, he completes the transition from Calvinism to Unitarianism that began in his youth. Viewing Priestley as a son of the Enlightenment, none of these activities is surprising. What is surprising from that viewpoint is that he led the defence of theism against the criticisms of Hume, d’Holbach, Gibbon, and later Erasmus Darwin. Is he or is he not an Enlightenment intellectual? If he is then what sense does it make to talk of an Enlightenment project, one which will have to accommodate Hume, d’Holbach, and Priestley?

Why did marriage become central to the English novel in the eighteenth century? As clandestine weddings and the unruly culture that surrounded them began to threaten power and property, questions about where and how to marry became urgent matters of public debate. In 1753, in an unprecedented and controversial use of state power, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke mandated Anglican church weddings as marriage's only legal form. Resistance to his Marriage Act would fuel a new kind of realist marriage plot in England and help to produce political radicalism as we know it. Focussing on how major authors from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen made church weddings a lynchpin of their fiction, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot offers a truly innovative account of the rise of the novel by telling the story of the English marriage plot's engagement with the most compelling political and social questions of its time.

- by Lisa O'Connell
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- British Literature, Women's writing, The Novel, Eighteenth Century History

Questo articolo apre una serie di scritti con cui l’autore si propone di indagare sul variegato valore della letteratura di Jane Austen e sul suo rapporto con la contemporaneità. I lettori saranno accompagnati in un percorso che metterà Austen a confronto con la settima arte, ma anche con la filosofia, con la Storia, con la cultura del paesaggio e con i contesti letterari più disparati, in uno stimolante dibattito multidisciplinare.

- by Cesare Catà
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- English Literature, Romanticism, Hermeneutics, Jane Austen
- by Emma Griffin
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- Modern History, Cultural History, British History, Modern British History

Thomas Poole a Somerset magistrate and close friend of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a report on the state of the poor in his parish of Nether Stowey in the year 1832. This report provides an unique glimpse into the lives of the eighteenth century poor at the level of an individual parish. It was written at a time when the numbers and costs of the poor were rising very fast and becoming of great concern both to parliament and to the government.

Michael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish opera The Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni’s intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant – a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain’s leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

- by Uri Erman
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- Jewish Studies, British History, Opera, Eighteenth Century History

The practice of criticism of authors and works in England from 1660 to 1789

- by Paul Trolander and +1
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- British Literature, Literary Criticism, Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Literary Theory

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

- by John Styles and +1
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- Economic History, History of Dress, Consumers & Consumption, Design History

This paper principally concerns the examination of four English midwifery treatises written by midwives between 1671 and 1795. It focuses on their responses to the medicalisation of childbirth and, in particular, their concerns about medical negligence and their views on the value of anatomical knowledge to the development and defence of their practice. They wrote during a period of mounting tension between midwives and men midwives, when even the most inexperienced men automatically assumed authority over traditional midwives. The texts reveal the authors' concerns about the harm being caused to women and infants by the indiscriminate use of birth instruments. Examples in the primary sources suggest that the practice of both types of midwife ranged from excellent to lethal. However, the midwife-authors perceived men midwives as a threat: unjustly denigrating traditional practice and rapidly carving niches for themselves in midwifery by attending wealthy and influential families, using their birth instruments to intervene and deliver women, sometimes on dubious grounds, and by publishing substantive texts which further promoted their usefulness to society.

The correspondence of John Legas, Samuel Remnant and others, relating to the production and sale of ordnance and shot, 1745-1749.

These extracts on music from the correspondence between Charles Jennens (1700–73) and Edward Holdsworth (1684–1746) reflect the authors' shared interests and (prohibited) political views. Though commonly known as the librettist of Messiah, Jennens was also a collector of music and art, and as such capitalized on Holdworth's travels as a tutor of young gentlemen on the Grand Tour. Many of the letters detail musical commissions and their fulfilment by a willing Holdsworth. In return, Jennens acted as Holdsworth's financial advisor, editorial consultant and publication adviser. Other discussions centre around the public and personal rating of singers and operas, in London and abroad, and include discussions of Handel's fortunes, his borrowing of music from Jennens's collection and his health. Mentions of personnel are not restricted to musicians but also encompass members of Jennens's family and of his and Holdsworth's social circles, many of whom were supporters of Handel.

This work seeks to examine both the contemporary evidence and historiography of the controversial relationship between King George III and his advisor, mentor, and Favourite, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. It finds that the so-called 'Whig' and 'Tory' narratives often tell us more about the historians themselves than the period they claim to have been examining. It becomes clear that legitimate constitutional concerns were raised in the early years of George III's reign and that more work needs to be done in examination of contemporary views on the British constitution in the late eighteenth century.

- by Ben Gilding
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- British History, Legal History, British Politics, Eighteenth Century History

The polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.

- by Avinoam Yuval-Naeh
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- European History, Economic History, European Studies, Early Modern History

Droving has been hugely important in shaping farming practice across Northumberland for 1,000 years or more. The necessity of transporting sheep and cattle has changed the landscape, and developed the roads and buildings and at one time, animals would be herded from as far a field as Scotland and Ireland. Today the scene is very different but the legacy of the drovers can still be seen and enjoyed all over the region. Local archaeologists Ian Roberts, Alan Rushworth and Richard Calrton have been determined to preserve this history on behalf of the Northumberland National Park Authority. Following the development of droving in Northumberland from prehistoric times, through Middle Ages, the eighteenth century and right up to date, they offer the definitive history of this significant activity.

This article examines how The wealth of nations (1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates. In his chapter on colonies, Smith had proposed both a scheme for the gradual devolution of the British empire and a theoretical scheme for imperial federation. In response to the growing global popularity of protectionism and imperial expansionism, the rapid development of new tools of globalization, and the frequent onset of economic downturns throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, turn-of-the-century proponents of British imperial federation formed into a formidable opposition to England's prevailing free trade orthodoxy – Cobdenism – a free trade ideology which famously expanded upon the anti-imperial dimensions of The wealth of nations. Ironically, at the turn of the century many advocates for imperial federation also turned to Smith for their intellectual inspiration. Adam Smith thus became an advocate of empire, and his advocacy left an indelible intellectual mark upon the burgeoning British imperial crisis.