Documenting art: An 18th century collection through its catalogue descriptions

This article explores the ambiguous relationship between various busts by Louis François Roubiliac commissioned by Henry, 9th Earl of Pembroke and his family, including six versions of the 9th Earl himself. The majority of these busts are now at Wilton House and have usually been understood to form a group to be displayed together. However, close examination of the documentary evidence, including successive editions of the Wilton guidebook, reveals that only two were shown together, and that no bust of the 9th Earl was in the house in the eighteenth century, although one marble version was at the family’s London house and another formed part of his monument in the church at Wilton. Yet while not created as a group to be seen together, these busts share one significant feature – their highly polished finish. It is argued here that this was a distinctive aspect of Roubiliac’s sculptural practice and that these busts together constitute an exceptional case that allows us to discern what a surviving original surface might look like, something that has been until now difficult to identify. At the same time, the article addresses the methodological question of what evidence can be assembled in extended entries for individual objects in a catalogue raisonné, and how interconnections between individual works lie outside such entries and need to be explored in other ways.

Reviewed by: The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Paula McDowell Jennifer L. Airey (bio) Paula McDowell. The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 353. $45. We are living in a moment of profound cultural change, as the movement from print to online culture has fundamentally shifted the ways in which we access and process information and monetize written content. Set in this context, Paula McDowell’s The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain is an especially timely work, one that draws parallels between the developing technologies of the eighteenth century—in this case, the movement from oral to print culture—and our own. It is only in retrospect, McDowell argues, that we can fully understand the implications of such a monstrous cultural shift, but similarities have already emerged between eighteenth-century reactions to technological change and our own: concerns over what is being lost, fears about the democratization of access to content, and uncertainty about how to monetize new modes of information transmission. According to McDowell, the concept of the “oral” came into being in the eighteenth century as an umbrella term for a series of often unrelated concepts. Encapsulating at once beliefs about religious tradition, appropriate gender roles, and social class divides, reactions to the concept of orality in the eighteenth century offer insight into a wide variety of social and cultural attitudes. In drawing connections between the development of [End Page 494] eighteenth-century print culture and the emergence of the digital, McDowell’s book is both important and timely. As a work of scholarship on the eighteenth century, it is a masterful and often enlightening work, offering new interpretations of well-known works by authors such as Defoe, Johnson, and Swift, and engaging with previously understudied voices such as those of the Billingsgate fishwives and John “Orator” Henley. McDowell begins in her first chapter with a nuanced analysis of the concept of oral tradition as it emerged in the eighteenth century. While the word “tradition” is now used in predominantly secular ways, it had important religious resonance in the early modern period. For Catholics, who placed emphasis on the importance of priestly intercession between the individual and God, “the tradition of the church is of equal authority with scripture” (28). For Protestants, by contrast, who privileged Biblical text and the individual’s relationship with God, the concept of tradition was much more fraught. Protestants positioned scripture—and by extension writing—as “the most reliable method of preserving and communicating knowledge” (29). Of particular interest in this chapter is McDowell’s reading of Dryden; prior to his conversion, she argues, Dryden linked orality with the vulgar rabble. As a Catholic, however, he became more supportive of oral tradition, arguing in The Hind and the Panther that the Catholic Church “by Tradition’s force upheld the Truth” (39). The battle between print and oral authority was central to other eighteenth-century debates. English common law, for instance, was composed of many unwritten laws, and thus “seventeenth-century proponents of the Ancient Constitution appealed to the authority of an ancient, unwritten tradition of laws and customs to further their own political goals” (45). Meanwhile antiquarians lamented the loss of oral culture (including lower-class slang, popular ballads, and the oral poetry of the Scottish Highlands) resulting from the growth of print. Not all forms of oral transmission were viewed positively, however; the concept of old wives’ tales, for instance, reflects the disrespect in which women’s speech was consistently held. McDowell turns in chapter 2 to Swift’s treatment of speech in A Tale of a Tub. As a clergyman himself, Swift understood well the importance of dynamic oratory in the pulpit, and he suggested that Dissenters were dangerous precisely because they knew how to perform for largely illiterate audiences. Swift associated the physicality and emotion of the spoken sermon “with popular unrest and gender subversion from below” (67). Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is the subject of McDowell’s third chapter. As...

Reviewed by: The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain Patricia Meyer Spacks (bio) Betty A. Schellenberg. The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x+250pp. US$80. ISBN 0–521–65060–6. This enlightening study further undermines the already tottering doctrine of "separate spheres" in eighteenth-century Britain. By examining careers rather than only individual works of female writers, Schellenberg makes a powerful case for eighteenth-century women's participation in public life. She exposes the inadequacy of literary criticism or historiography that assumes female subordination as the fact of paramount importance, and she raises far-reaching critical and historical questions. Schellenberg does not argue that female literary careers duplicated male ones. On the contrary, a conspicuous virtue of her book is its careful distinctions. Thus Sarah Fielding, a "woman of letters," can preserve an identity and imagine a career not fully professionalized, in contrast to the comparably prolific Charlotte Lennox, who saw herself and was widely seen as a professional writer. Sarah Scott deliberately obscured the extent of her literary production, in effect denying connection between her private and public life, through anonymity, pseudonymity, and disjunctive publication by various booksellers. [End Page 521] She burned her own letters and virtually disappeared from literary view: Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785) mentions Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison, but neither links them nor names their author. Frances Sheridan positioned herself to comment on public issues; Frances Brooke consciously supported a specific political agenda. The young Frances Burney fashioned an artful persona as "author," purposefully separating herself from more amateurish female writers. Possibilities for female career-shaping, Schellenberg amply demonstrates, were multifarious. Surveying women's careers, Schellenberg reminds us of the varied literary production that characterized them. Fielding not only wrote novels and that remarkable experimental fiction, The Cry; her contemporaries considered her especially distinguished for her translation of Xenophon. Lennox published a periodical, poetry, plays, and several translations, including a version of Shakespeare's sources, complete with critical commentary. Scott wrote history, as did Brooke, who also experimented with poetry, plays, and a periodical. Like their male counterparts, then, these women, writing for money, responded to market realities. Reaction to their work in reviews, Schellenberg shows, often ignored their gender. Contrary to much recent critical assumption, women writers were not universally patronized or ignored. Reviewers sought in their work, as in men's, human insight, moral sensitivity, wit, and imaginative development. When a reviewer found such qualities, he praised them. Schellenberg does not, however, claim that women's literary careers proved easy. Female authors shared men's difficulties, and they might find them—well, more difficult. Lennox, with two children and an irresponsible husband, faced urgent economic problems, which she confronted on occasion by soliciting subscriptions without producing a volume to justify them. Sarah Fielding, an unmarried gentlewoman, also financially needy, relied on the kindness of friends. Burney used The Witlings to express her annoyance about the pressures of female amateurism. Schellenberg not only describes women's literary careers, but also delineates and speculates about their cultural context. Her investigations include inquiry about the literary standards applied by eighteenth-century reviewers and about what she calls (borrowing the term from Clifford Siskin) "the Great Forgetting": the process by which female writers disappeared from the canon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The standards of the eighteenth century, she argues, might provide useful suggestions for our own evaluations of early women writers, and "the Great Forgetting" offers a cautionary tale. Previous accounts of how women became "forgotten" literary figures have stressed male efforts to regularize the canon. Schellenberg emphasizes the contributions women themselves made to the elimination of their predecessors. The famous Bluestocking correspondence of Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter (published in 1809) systematically denigrates Lennox, on moral grounds, and elevates Sarah Fielding. Burney claims male but not female precursors. Frances Brooke, purportedly complaining about the devaluation of women novelists, names not a single one. Even Reeve, who mentions [End Page 522] numerous women in her genealogy of the novel, illustrates principles by which women might be "forgotten." Such instances do not add up to...

The freshman composition course is a peculiarly American institution not shared by modern British or European universities. This study grew out of an attempt to understand why rhetoric fell from favor in the British universities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and why composition, as an course, failed to develop. It is the purpose of this study to examine writing instruction in the British universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to understand such developments.2 Writing instruction within any society is subject to social and political influences, and nowhere is this more true than in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain, that territory that encompassed England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In addition, strong religious movements and a special linguistic situation during this period shaped where and how writing was taught. The eighteenth century in Britain was a period of transition as the agricultural population migrated to the cities in large numbers. Industrialization was rapid. Between 1700 and 1800, England saw the rise of the industrial centers of Manchester and Liverpool, while Scotland changed from a poor agricultural society to a relatively industrialized one with an increase in population from 84,000 to 500,000 during the nineteenth century. Preparatory schools and universities were not available or adequate. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, England had two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Although Scotland had four well-established universities, Ireland had one, and Wales none. The eighteenth century was also a period of upward mobility, and good English became a rung on the ladder. With economic stability established, the large and powerful merchant class and those aspiring to better themselves saw education in general, and language in particular, as one of the ways to move up. In response, the school teachers and grammarians, with a strong belief in rationality and rules, set out to standardize the language, firm in the beliefs that change was a sign of deterioration and that Latin was the standard by which all languages should be measured. During the period there was also a rise in nationalism, which resulted in a new reverence for language and literature. Although men and

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 Karol K. Weaver Susan E. Klepp . Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. 312. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $65.00; Paper, $24.95.) Susan Klepp's Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 is a groundbreaking and thorough study of how women empowered themselves during the revolutionary period by limiting childbearing and by gaining more control over their own bodies. Klepp shows how late eighteenth-century colonial American women rebelled against [End Page 71] lifelong childbearing and unlimited access to their bodies. She supports her thesis with a variety of methodologies, primary sources, and voices. Revolutionary Conceptions argues that, in the late eighteenth century, many American women and some men decided to limit family size. Female colonists applied the revolutionary values of rationality, restraint, and virtue to their bodies and their families. Women defined virtue for themselves as sexual restraint and embraced female modesty. Their acceptance of these values was due in part to real physical and sexual dangers they faced during the American Revolution. Klepp points out that "humiliation, exposure, violation, or rape of women by the enemy" were weapons of war (94). Boycotts and other activities that encouraged economic restraint affected perceptions of high fertility and large families came to be seen as luxuries during the difficult days of the Revolution. Women's pregnant body, likewise, was viewed as excess. Rational motherhood and parenting meant that women planned and counted the number of children, and cherished each child, whether male or female, by working hard to provide educational and economic opportunities to all, not simply to the eldest son. Klepp summarizes, "The fertility transition was a sudden and radical change for those first generations of individual women and men who made a conscious decision to disavow past practices and switch to various family-planning strategies" (275). In order to support her thesis, Klepp employs an assortment of methodologies in her book. She utilizes demography to show how the high fertility of the mid-eighteenth century gave way to a steady decline in childbearing. Klepp clearly explains her demographic methodology and includes myriad graphs in order to visually prove her point to the reader. Klepp relies on gender history to reveal how femininity was transformed over the course of the eighteenth century and what effects this change had on family size, perceptions of the female body, and the duties and responsibilities of mothers. She uses medical history to highlight what women thought about pregnancy, health, and disease. She also considers women's herbal strategies for spacing, limiting, and stopping pregnancies. In addition, Klepp makes use of art history to demonstrate how the portrayal of the abundant female body was replaced with depictions of rational and modest mothers. The methodologies that Klepp uses to sustain her argument require her to consult an amazing array of primary sources. Her demographic analysis depends on census records, county registries, and church records. In order [End Page 72] to uncover the gender history of eighteenth-century colonial America and its relationship to family limitation, Klepp consults women's journals and correspondence between family members, including husbands and wives. Her investigation into the medical means of limiting fertility is founded on herbals, receipt books, and dispensary records. Klepp's art historical examination incorporates twenty-one illustrations, each of which is thoroughly analyzed. However, Klepp's integration of visual primary source evidence is undermined by the decision to describe in detail artworks (at least sixteen) that are not included as illustrations in the text. Perhaps, this oversight was a decision on the part of Klepp's editors. A similar weakness was the lack of a bibliography; footnotes are complete, but a full bibliography would have allowed the reader to seek inspiration more easily from Klepp's primary and secondary sources. Klepp's excellent methodological analysis and incorporation of myriad primary sources are complemented by her outstanding comparative history of family limitation. Klepp considers women and men of different classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and regions. She works hard to uncover their views on pregnancy, childrearing, family...

200 which she so well recognizes and deconstructs in the approaches taken by others, namely the ‘‘ideology of ethics’’inherent in ‘‘the party of humanity.’’ Her arguments about the power of the aesthetic therefore serve only to mystify and legitimate the current ideological status quo. William J. Burling Southwest Missouri State University RICHARD BRADFORD. Augustan Measures . Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Writings on Prosody and Metre. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. viii ⫹ 247. $79.95. Mr. Bradford’s ambition to correct the deficiencies of Paul Fussell’s Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1954) produces a curiously retro monograph . The deficiencies are ones that Fussell himself points out: a discussion of ‘‘(1) the controversy over the nature of accent and quantity; (2) the eighteenthcentury theory of the nature of rhyme; (3) the theory of line integrity; and (4) the theory of the caesura.’’ Mr. Bradford thinks that these ‘‘four topics’’ should have been Fussell’s interest in the first place. In any case, Mr. Bradford is tempted to imitate the rusted generalities of second-rate literary history: ‘‘Milton, and after him Blake and Wordsworth, deliberately create tensions between the formal component of verse, the line, and the more contingent component, syntax or meaning. In the process both elements are intensified in a way which the poetry and criticism of the intervening hundred years could not comprehend.’’ One person who directly contradicts this is none other than Mr. Bradford himself in his Silence and Sound (reviewed in The Scriblerian , 26, Autumn 1993). Otherwise his present study accepts many things from the earlier one. He still takes no notice of issues of race, class, and gender— but he does recycle. A lot of the recycling involves Paradise Lost. Mr. Bradford continues to assume that the poem itself is a theory of prosody, but he finds it hard to extend this principle to the practice of versification in the eighteenth century. His attention to Pope is perfunctory; Waller, Dryden, and Prior do not rate even that effort, while Swift and Gay disappear—along with all of the women poets, perhaps the most radical retro-ism of the monograph. The canceling out of poets and certain poems also cancels out views and information different from Mr. Bradford’s own. By relying on the trite convenience of ‘‘the ‘graveyard’ school of Blair, Gray, and Young,’’ he shuns the obstreperous Gray and modern comment on his versification , and in another episode of historical amnesia removes Goldsmith as well as Collins and Smart. Johnson says naughty things about Milton’s blank verse—it was ‘‘verse only to the eye’’—for which Mr. Bradford is eager to scold him over and over, while dodging the inconvenient fact that Johnson sometimes wrote in blank verse. Readers who do not know much about eighteenth-century poetry, let alone prosody itself, might comeaway assured that there is not much to know. Of course, there really were experiments in metrical variation, even freeverse.Pastoral and the ode attracted the display of individual talent in metrical art. But no matter; one poem here serves the intolerance of an aesthetic fundamentalism, and Mr. Bradford revisits from Silence and Sound pet examples of Milton’s enjambment with undue veneration. Milton is drafted to humble Thomson, Young, and (most easily of all) Dodsley. Actually Mr. Bradford reorganizes the 201 eighteenth-centurycriticismfromSilence and Sound into the kind of old success story that used to be told about the ‘‘Triumph of Romanticism.’’ Its emphasis is the history of the analysis of Milton’s blank verse; Sheridan’s Art of Reading (1775) is ‘‘the finest work of prosodic criticism in the eighteenth century’’ because of his ‘‘discovery’’ of adding a ‘‘pause of suspension’’or momentaryrest of thevoiceatanenjambedline.Thistime around Mr. Bradford also reads into it the intuition by Sheridan of a ‘‘metrical contract ’’ between Milton and the reader of how to perform the line endings, something Mr. Bradford derives without acknowledgment from John Hollander. Richard Eversole University of Kansas JOAN BEAL. English Pronunciation inthe Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s ‘‘Grand Repository of the English Language .’’ Oxford: Oxford, 1999. Pp. 239. $120; $29.95 (paper). Ms. Beal argues in her comprehensive —though often dense—text that sound change during the...

This fascinating study explores the cultural phenomenon of the outlaw in the long eighteenth century in France. As the title suggests, it presents a typology of criminals as well as their privileged topographies. It constitutes an excellent overview of its subject, ranging historically from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century and taking in not only France but also eighteenth-century Britain. Issues of gender and criminality are also usefully addressed. The breadth of coverage necessarily leads to occasional repetitions and the overall structure of the study is not always clear, something made worse by the lack of a conclusion. Nonetheless, the extensive bibliography, handily divided into subsections, indicates insightful further reading both in key primary sources and the most relevant and recent critical literature on the topic. What emerges consistently is that eighteenth-century outlaws operated primarily in liminal spaces, across borders of various sorts, often in the half-light of dawn or dusk, and they came into their own in the equally liminal imaginative space between fact and fiction, where the bourgeoning press culture met the popular literary forms of the ballad, memoir, and novel. This is particularly the case in England, where a more open judicial system, court reports, greater press and publishing freedoms, and rapid urbanization gave the figure of the contemporary outlaw more realism as well as a more prevalent place in the social imaginary than was the case in France. The pirate in particular is an English outlaw archetype whose heyday was the late seventeenth century, although Lise Andries makes pertinent distinctions between the very different forms of piracy operative in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean at the time. What is true for both France and England is that the outlaw gives real and fictional voice to alternative social values, challenging those of the prevailing order, as Andries demonstrates with her interesting survey of criminal types in Robert Challe, Alain-René Lesage, Prévost, Diderot, and Sade. By the time of the Revolution, the outlaw in France had become an autonomous literary creation, only to be reinvented again in light of the more radical political and social upheavals of the 1790s. While Andries never loses sight of the nasty, brutish, short lives of eighteenth-century criminals — their violence matched, and often surpassed, by that of the state and its officials — she makes a strong case for outlaw collectives offering thrillingly attractive counter-societies for many of their contemporaries. From the real-life cours des Miracles to the fabled pirate republics, these alternative communities are more nostalgic of lost golden ages than they are revolutionary. The exception, however, was Louis Mandrin’s popular banditry against the hated tax officials of the Ferme générale. Indeed, the most intriguing, enlightening chapter in the book is devoted to outlaw economies. It argues perceptively that colonial and metropolitan smuggling was an important motor for the modernization and liberalization of the French economy, since it flooded the market with ‘de-taxed’ goods and increased their circulation substantially. This is one insight among many in this informative, wide-ranging study.

In 1677, the Jesuit prelate in Rio de Janeiro, Father Silveira Dias, summarily excommunicated every distinguished member of the city’s municipal council. Although priests frequently quarreled with local officials over such issues as control of indigenous labor, marching order in annual processions, or the extent of clerical exemption from municipal taxation, only in the most extreme scuffles did clerics make heretics of the local elite. In this case, the Jesuits exercised excommunication, their ultimate weapon, in defense of a fetid mangrove swamp.1This was not an isolated instance. In the next decade, the Benedictines and individual landholders, with respective threats of excommunication and arrest against trespassers, pursued exclusive claims to the mangrove forests that bordered their lands on Rio’s extensive Guanabara Bay.2 As a result, the bay’s wretched free poor—abruptly barred from a resource that had supplied much of their food and had been traditionally open to all—appealed to the municipal council for redress. Despite strong ties to landed interests, the council challenged all corporate and private claims to areas seaward of the high tide. With crown support, the council reaffirmed the mangroves’ public status, holding that, as in Portugal, tidelands were state property and open to the use of all. In a colony where forest and field were generally hoarded by fidalgo, priest, and king, Brazil’s tidal forests—due in part to their brackish location—escaped elite monopolization.This study investigates the relationship between two peripheral populations: the mangroves at the fringes of the colonial landscape, and the peoples at the margins of the plantation economy.3 Brazil’s rural poor, landless due to latifundia and wageless due to slavery, prioritized subsistence in their economic life and engaged various strategies to evade the prospect of hunger. These strategies, of course, included subsistence planting on plots granted at the landholder’s consent, but sources suggest that where possible the rural poor preferred hunting, fishing, and gathering from nature’s abundance. While many explained these activities as unproductive and the result of the free poor’s lazy disposition, the drive to eat seems to best explain the poor’s unique set of “indolent” strategies. Subsistence security—having enough to eat—was at the center of their economic life, and it outweighed all other ambitions.The ruling elite acknowledged the poor’s basic right to eat and defended a primitive moral economy by reserving some mangroves for the exclusive use of the poor. Hence, by the coincidence of the poor’s hunger, the state’s paternalism, and the mangrove’s own unrivaled fecundity, mangroves outside immediate urban areas survived the onslaught of colonization. Today mangroves still grace as much as one-third of Brazil’s coastline. Conservation can only take a portion of the credit for mangrove survivals, but what is exceptional is that, at least in some areas, strict conservation policies were shaped not by the commercial interests of the elite but by the subsistence requirements of the poor.The mangrove forest was commonly deprecated as the epitome of wilderness, the antithesis of civilization, and the primary breeder of tropical disease.4 But recurring conflicts evidence the mangroves’ role in meeting the subsistence needs of the poor and the commercial interests of the elite.5 Due to the mangroves’ many extractives (including firewood, timber, lime, clay, tannin, fish, shellfish, and feathers) and its easy access by water, these swamps of rank muck and impassable tangles were among the colony’s most exploited resources. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, formerly the colony’s highest forest official, opined that, had the king granted the Jesuits exclusive control over Rio de Janeiro’s mangroves in 1677, he might as well have given them the city and captaincy as well, “for all of their inhabitants would have been sold to the avarice of great corporations, which would have become the rulers and only lords of the fortunes and persons of their fellow citizens.”6 Silva Lisboa may be accused of anticlerical exaggeration, but he points to the mangroves’ notable place in the colonial economy.Mangroves, adapted to the brackish waters and anaerobic muds of tropical tidelands, framed much of Brazil’s colonial coastline, particularly the estuarine waters on which her chief urban centers were located. In fact, all of Brazil’s major colonial ports held extensive reserves.7 Brazil’s mangrove formations, unlike most tropical forests, are simple in composition, consisting largely of three arboreal varieties: red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), black mangrove, commonly known as siriúba (Avicennia schaueriana and nitida), and white mangrove (Laguncularia racemosa).8 Most distinctive for its stiltlike respiratory roots, the red mangrove dominates the immediate shoreline and serves as pioneer in the mangrove forest’s expansion, colonizing shallows and creating dry land as it advances. Its viviparous fruit extends the mangrove’s propagative power by floating for as long as a year searching for shallow mud in which to sink its energetic roots. Just inland the siriúba predominates, identified by the hundreds of snorkel-like pneumataphores (respiratory roots) that jut from the mud and by the salt crystals sparkling on its leaves. The white mangrove, with less pronounced pneumataphores, inhabits the highest land. All together, along with a rather small variety of lesser plants and grasses, these form the mangal.Here colonists found a ready abundance that was unmatched by other colonial habitats in providing subsistence. Simão de Vasconcellos, a seventeenth-century Jesuit historian, noted that while the mangrove had no fruit of any value, it compensated admirably for this fault “with various utilities of yet greater advantage to the inhabitants.”9 Tidal forests are an extreme example of an eco-tone—a habitat formed by the meeting of two others—and, like most eco-tones, they embrace uncommon numbers of living creatures. The mangrove’s own leaf is master link in a complex food chain that supports immense stocks of fish and shellfish. Annually, mangroves nourish the creatures about their roots with more than six thousand kilograms of fallen leaves per hectare. Algae, protozoa, and various larvae feed upon this detritus, and crabs and various fishes consume the now proteinized leaves. Some fishes pass their entire lives among the mangroves; others, both salt and freshwater species, employ the mangroves as spawning grounds and nurseries. All classes, including slaves, exploited the mangals’ fish and shellfish as important sources of protein. Vasconcellos pointed out the curiosity of shellfish being both the “sumptuous repast of the rich and a staple of the poor.”10In harvesting the mangal, early colonists only imitated the practices of the coastal natives. In fact, the largest archaeological objects bequeathed by Brazil’s precolumbian peoples were the mangroves’ shell middens (sambaquis), some of which are 350 meters long and 25 meters high. For maybe a century after the first European settlements, subsistence remained the primary utility of the mangrove swamp, and I will first describe what the inhabitants consumed and how it was collected. Thereafter, I will depict the beginnings of the mangrove’s commodification and, finally, how the state responded to the impact of this development on the subsistence needs of the poor.Many colorful, raucous birds nested in the mangroves’ branches, but early observers took little note. What demanded attention was the multitude of crabs that gave the mangal its animation. More than a hundred crabs might inhabit one square meter of mud, and “boiling” was the common adjective used to describe their collective movement. Many crabs, particularly the largest specimens, found protection among the red mangrove’s roots. The little aratu (Aratus pisoni)—the agile, prehensile monkey of the crab family—spent part of its life in the mangroves’ branches feeding on the young leaves and tender buds. The swimming siri (Callinectus spp) were abundant and tasty, and the guanhumi (Cardisoma guanhumi), whose mouths were reported large enough to accommodate a man’s leg, wandered far from their dens during thunderstorms and caused such a racket together that they spooked locals into charging armed from their houses, believing they were under native attack. The swift guanhumi were difficult to catch, so when one sidled into the house it was considered a windfall due to their excellent meat and sizable portions. In the 1640s, the Dutch naturalist Willem Piso noted that Dutch soldiers loved to hunt them in the late afternoon and that the meat was good enough alone to satisfy entire cohorts. Potiaçu (Macrobrachium amazonicum), the freshwater lobster, and various species of shrimp were also harvested from the mangroves’ waters.11The mangrove, or fiddler, crab (Ucides cordatus), nearly always referred to by its indigenous name uçá, was the most widely collected and highly praised for flavor. It was also remarkable for its defenses—a single oversized pincer that drew blood from unprotected flesh. But succulence trumped truculence, and Fernão Cardim in 1583 described the uçá in Bahia as “the sustenance of all this land, particularly of the Guinea slaves and Indians.” In the same decade, Gabriel Soares de Sousa observed that the uçá fed on leaf litter, shellfish, carrion, and each other, shocking newcomers by their unspeakable numbers. Gatherers (mariscadores) determined a crab’s size by the diameter of its den and adeptly barehanded even the largest, reportedly harvesting only the males. Soares de Sousa explained that “there is no inhabitant on the farms of Bahia who does not hire an Indian daily to gather these crabs; and from each sugar mill go four or five of these Indian gatherers.” A single gatherer collected three to four hundred live crabs each day, all safely caged in large woven baskets. Many slaves apparently gathered crabs and shellfish on their own time as well. The Jesuit planter Antonil condemned planters who failed to feed their slaves adequately or to grant them a weekday to plant food crops, as this forced slaves to take what little time they had at the end of the day to go in search of a crab for supper, which, along with shellfish, was the slaves’ favored food.12 Hence, slave provisioning was not entirely dependent on local agriculture and charqui imports.A great variety of shellfish also came from the mangroves, and colonial writers provided extensive lists. Luís dos Santos Vilhena stated that the variety “caused admiration at the multiplicity of living things created in these seas.”13 Oysters, which had long been a favorite of the natives, were in great favor among colonists as well: boiled, fried, or raw. The leriassu, which bedded in the mud, were so large they had to be cut into quarters to be eaten, and their shells, lined with mother of pearl, served as dinner plates and basins in São Vicente.14 The smaller lerimirim, which were a staple of many tables, bedded right on the mangrove roots from which they were collected at low tide. Soares de Sousa noted that lerimirim were so thick on the roots that one could not see the wood beneath, and that they “never deplete, because when removed, others are soon born in their places.”15While the harvest was enjoyed by all, the work was reportedly distasteful. In 1817, Louis-Francois de Tollenare gathered oysters in the mangroves that backed the island of Itaparica, Bahia, and advised his readers against it as recreation. In addition to causing sunburn, the walk through knee-deep mud was exhausting, and no fewer than 30 unidentified insects burrowed into his feet. Mosquitoes also found an ideal habitat in the mangal, and locals repelled them with smoky torches of bundled straw, although in some seasons the biting clouds became so thick that whole villages temporarily relocated.16 In 1789, a band of runaway slaves in Bahia penned a rare treaty offering terms under which they would resubmit themselves to their master, Manoel da Silva Ferreira. Many provisions dealt with their subsistence needs. In addition to time off for food production, the fugitives demanded the master provide them with a good canoe and fishing nets and declared that if he provided them a good launch, they were willing to put fish on his table as well. But under no circumstances was he to order them to gather shellfish or build weirs in the mangroves. If the master “desires to eat shellfish,” they wrote, “order your Mina blacks” to gather them. Apparently, only the lowliest African-born slaves were expected to perform this disagreeable task.17The mangroves were also among the colonists’ primary fishing grounds, and coastal fishing even today correlates with surviving mangroves. The variety of fare, from sea cow to sardines, was fantastic. Early in the twentieth century, the fishermen of Santos could name more than one hundred species of fish in the mangroves and commonly netted 24 species in a single cast.18 Cardim wrote that fishing was so productive in the late sixteenth century that surplus catch was used to fatten pigs, and he reported with epicurean satiety that all the homes he visited in Bahia were “so full of fish and shellfish, that in their abundance the people live like counts, and they waste much.” The xareu (jack, Caranx hippos) was among the more important fish for human consumption, although consumed largely by the poor. Massive nets requiring 50 to 60 men, who worked for a share of the catch, hauled 1,500–2,000 fish at a time. A meter in length, the fatty xareu was also salted in barrels as sailor rations.19 Many fish, such as the tainha (mullet, Mugil brasiliensis) and corvina (Micropogonias furnieri), inhabited the mangroves and in season were also taken in large numbers. However, the tainha, which ran in dense schools, were difficult to net due to their propensity to jump, so fishermen simply beat the water with their paddles and let the fish leap into their canoes. The improbability of this technique is outweighed by the numbers who reported it; around 1800 one witness, John Black, reported that several canoes were filled by this means in 20 minutes.20By the beginning of the seventeenth century the desire to commodify the mangroves intensified. Fish and shellfish were never much exported, but the mangal was an important source not only of subsistence foods but also of commodities essential to building the colony and advancing its exports. The extractions in some cases benefited the rural poor who might find therein an independent living. But the commodification of the mangroves also conflicted directly with their subsistence needs by destroying the creatures that bred there.Mangrove was the principal fuel in coastal regions, due to its accessibility to water transport and its high quality. Red mangrove is extremely dense (1.20 specific gravity), making it a superior fuel whether in the form of raw firewood or charcoal.21 Sugar millers in particular, but also whale oil processors, lime producers, brick and tile makers, and distillers, all placed demands of near industrial levels on the mangrove for fuel. Firewood accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the costs of sugar mill production, and already by the 1670s mills in the northern reaches of Bahia’s bay were harvesting mangrove fuel 70 km to the south on Itaparica Island and in the town of Jaguaripe. In the mid– eighteenth century, ships making passage to Europe generally stocked 1,000 billets of mangrove fuel for the crew’s needs. And even Portugal made fuel demands on the mangrove, importing an of billets from Bahia each year in the late of course, was in addition to the daily needs of the in the the mangroves provided 20 percent of all the fuel consumed by Rio’s fuel was and to mangrove fuel early in the twentieth century worked from the only a for a and a to their worked in muck and water as they the into and them into canoes. As the immediate coastal were cut and into the of the mangal to water access to the white and siriúba mangroves. It was labor, but it long remained a than and from of Brazil’s coastal which were over and among mangroves, were also largely of them. while not an timber, mangrove was among the to the poor classes, as most had been by the crown and were found on private land. to the century, for Rio’s urban poor was of mangrove and the of these and other including mills and plantation came largely from the red and siriúba mangroves. And mangrove found its the particularly to and the as for de even for who could the which the source of for were in the of mangroves, in part because the mangrove’s fuel was for and also because its was used to the Antonil had sugar millers from a to their as the for mangrove fuel the slaves’ source of shellfish. Antonil identified the that in a band between the mangal and dry the major source of during the colonial who a de his the of the São mangal near providing access to the inland and the mangrove’s fuel the Sugar which to or and the of which were to the mills for the of sugar slaves to it on canoes together with In the of the seventeenth century, Rio’s city council to the building of mangrove with which they considered both urban and by the of and at a that numbers could But this would simply one mangrove for it was in the mangroves that found the lime that the the century, Brazil’s lime came from the shell large that some them the entirely by mangroves. as one could harvest both the and the fuel to them to which and firewood to a formed of of and mangrove firewood, which they for to to the was simple and less of shell lime was not on with that of the that was from as The local had a to black in the and for such as water lime was but nearly all common upon the for Cardim shell lime was as good as was Some sugar mills consumed more than three thousand of lime in their But at that time was no in Cardim that single the of Bahia, the and many other and it is still not the beginning of the century, lime in Rio the de who provided lime to the for building the and his on next to from the many mangroves of the northern Soares noted that the of Rio de and in the century placed demands on the mangroves for fuel and de considered shell which he observed at de as among the most to slave and provided a of slaves, in the of of their by the that had been from with a the themselves to the lime from their and waters of the mangal at one the red mangrove made to the colonial the form of high of in its Portugal supplied to Europe from her native but unlike the of salt that the crown upon the colony’s own extensive colonial mangrove with no and Vasconcellos that the leaves themselves more than to a of In the seventeenth century, engaged their own slaves to the red mangrove, but by the late eighteenth century became a In Bahia two hundred of mangrove from its and Rio de Janeiro, while to some extent on its bay’s own had it in from Santos and from as far as the through in 1817, of reported that a large the the waters between Rio and with such as to have taken on the role of In the early Brazil’s more than referred to as due to the mangrove’s some others and of the native the of of that were to the end of the eighteenth century, as Brazil’s and most the Jesuits is the first over the of the mangroves, although have been Thereafter, the of the mangals’ public status, the The of the mangal, an between the and of sea and land, to and It was easy enough to that common property at the of the high but did that the high or the extreme The to hundreds of square in an And as the the mangal along were the of land between them part of the mangal or the the mangal was on the the the the mangrove was most In with high red mangrove been observed to as much as one hundred meters the land through and leaf litter, the white mangrove will the highest by no public The of the mangals’ the desire for exclusive and the and of crown and local officials made the of the in and firewood, and But the the which, by in their even when all the mangal as this only the the mangal was an public an extreme form of common property where each with others in a to harvest nature’s the to who first and But the remained over which utility be given for many of the mangrove’s activities were among who cut the mangroves for were over whether sugar producers, brick makers, or the public to be interests the crown with claims the right to take their needs from the mangroves first or to all extractions with their As for mangrove so did demands for for the mangroves a and to human impact that is to most other tropical forests form over through a of species when are they in a single but only over time if The mangroves, on the other are pioneer does not over as in a but the landscape, when life from the roots. that had been cut for might be every of and Silva Lisboa reported that mangrove could be for fuel every what was of the was not so for its and the and of the red mangrove in the immediate of local fish and crabs and the of shellfish that with the of when only the red mangroves no the leaves so to the food who upon the mangal for food of these an planter in who that mangrove at such that for firewood could never also noted by that fish the waters in where the mangroves had been and that a near no fish was after the had themselves at the of this I as was some on the The of the mangroves, whether for timber, or as to subsistence as Bahia, about mangrove and the of local fish found in local town The of had a of in the that had to by and by with inhabitants in was its largest Although some was slave and labor, and the crown the largely upon subsistence forests, and waters to provide their daily fish and shellfish were more than In Manoel da observed that Bahia was the only place in all of the that had In the crown had made it to of the sea in order to on farms and were and were of these in Most on the but Bahia was Despite to build into the where and of by sea from to work in the people of no Fish and shellfish provided their Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, who both in and served as local planters that the would the of planting and result in the of the local Silva Lisboa that the did not on but nearly on the mangroves, for subsistence. he also the economic not to the of the but to the of the Despite his to the to and he that “the people live for the most part in with the sustenance of fish and oysters which on these and on northern greater access to the from the was in a dos Santos Vilhena described the town as being the

Preface Julie Park Click for larger view Figure 1 The "ancient" fortress of Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, designed by Sanderson Miller in 1751 and built in 1772. © Jonathan Lamb. All rights reserved. [End Page vi] Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Our men are the stoutest and the best, because strip them naked from the waist upwards, and give them no weapons at all but their Hands and Heels, and turn them into a room, or stage, and lock them in with the like number of other men of any nation, man for man, and they shall beat the best men you shall find in the world. —Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman In an article that appeared previously in this journal, Maximilian Novak addressed the question, "Why didn't the eighteenth century produce a War and Peace?" To answer the question is to account for why the "age of Johnson" or "the age of Enlightenment" was unable to produce a "serious and balanced depiction of the conditions [End Page vii] of war and peace in fiction."1 Novak arrives at his answers through a survey of eighteenth-century novels, from Defoe and Fielding to Smollett, as well as essays by Johnson, and poetry by Dryden and Dennis that treat war. If eighteenth-century authors embraced the challenges of verisimilitude in scenes of domestic life, or of producing universal moral truths, they could not meet the same mimetic challenges in direct confrontations with war, and with peace as a necessary adjunct of war. All attempts to do so would either be imbalanced—Defoe was "excellent on war ... but poor on peace"—or disarmed by the ironic and grotesque effects that David McNeil has delineated in the novels of Swift, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne.2 Such aesthetic resistance perhaps resulted from the spatial locations of war throughout eighteenth-century Britain, which Novak offers as a second hypothesis in answering his original question. With the exceptions of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, most British military activity took place elsewhere, outside Britain, "abroad—in America and India, on the Continent, and at sea."3 Moreover, eighteenth-century warfare was marked by its style of containment and regulation—its "limited warfare"—effected by the establishment of a standing army. Wars were won or lost more through tactics and strategy than through battle and combat.4 Eighteenth-century writers of fiction, then, averted their eyes from war, or transfigured it through the framework of irony, because the face of war was itself displaced, geographically and commercially. Either war took place elsewhere, or resurfaced domestically as the imported commodities that issued from, and in turn supported Britain's naval supremacy and success in colonial warfare.5 Thus a paradoxical yet all too convenient equation characterized the passages of war in eighteenth-century Britain: at the same time the technologies of war became sleeker and more effective, the conditions of war moved further away from the spaces of daily life and into the vague reaches of distant lands. The inhabitants of eighteenth-century Britain did not have to confront the living faces of violence and suffering on their own ground, if they chose not to do so.6 Some eighteenth-century artifacts, if not novels, succeed in embodying the charismatic and willfully deceiving (as well as self-deceiving) fabric of war on domestic ground. The "ancient" fortress of Wimpole [End Page viii] Hall, Cambridgeshire, for instance, designed by Sanderson Miller in 1751 and built in 1772, appears, as most follies do, to reflect a romanticizing eighteenth-century view of Gothic ruins, and the acquisitive desire to reconstruct them (see figure 1). However, the very framing of the "ancient" fortalice as a "folly" or "fake" also works to reinforce the dual meanings of "fabric" as both "an edifice" and "a contrivance." On the one hand, the medieval fortalice resurfaces in eighteenth-century domestic architecture as a...

Reviewed by: Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789 Katharine Kittredge (bio) Müller, Anja . Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789 Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. These are heady times to be a scholar of the eighteenth century. The advent of databases like the Gale Group's Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and more focused web-based archives like The Spectator Project and The Orlando Project have opened up exciting new avenues of research. Eighteenth-century conferences have become host to lively discussions about attribution, adaptation, and the significance of texts that were once considered profoundly obscure. In the context of this proliferation, it is encouraging to come across a book like Anja Müller's Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689-1789, which seamlessly weaves the old and the new parameters of research. On the one hand, Framing Childhood is a tradition-based product of hours spent in the depths of archives housed at Cambridge University and Yale's Lewis Walpole Library, which analyzes respected, canonical authors like Addison and Steele, the author-editors of The Tatler and The Spectator. On the other hand, this illustrated book conscientiously lists online editions in its "Primary Printed Sources" and suggests that readers peruse the volume with their computer browsers open, to call up images that didn't make the final cut. Müller helpfully gives directions in the Preface and throughout the text for finding online images of the more obscure texts, and any savvy Google user will be able to locate the rest. In this way, Framing Childhood becomes not necessarily the final word in the presentation of child-images in eighteenth-century texts, but rather, something more valuable: a work that invites readers to begin their own quests for a new, more complex understanding of eighteenth-century childhood that goes beyond the traditional view supplied only by literary and educational texts. Müller notes that most work on eighteenth-century childhood in literature and art tends to "focus on novels, children's literature, poetry, or painting" (14); in contrast to these sources, which are allied with elite classes, periodicals and prints function as mass media, reaching a wider audience that is more diverse in terms of social and economic class. Thus, periodicals and prints can be said to have played a major role in both reflecting and helping to create the social perceptions of the time. As Müller points out, "moral weeklies" like The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian have long been viewed as "instrumental for the formation of tastes and the shaping of English morals, manners, and ideologies" (15). Yet the role of satirical prints in shaping images of childhood in the midst of their primary roles as commentators on adults' "political, educational, social or moral" (16) activities has been largely overlooked. By considering the "constructive work performed by these two mass media" (235), Müller offers a more balanced view of the way childhood was [End Page 181] configured, directly challenging assumptions that continue to be made about the "myth of the origin of childhood in eighteenth-century England" (18). Müller divides her work on childhood into four major categories: "Fashioning Children's Bodies," "Framing Children's Minds," "Family Matters," and "Public Children." In each category, she offers an overview of the relevant discourse presented in the periodicals and chooses popular prints to read closely. "Fashioning Children's Bodies" includes periodical essays and shorter references that discuss a wide range of topics: whether children's natures are the result of heredity or of post-conception environmental influences; debates about childcare topics like breast-feeding and exercise; the appropriate gendering of children; and the nature of children's sexuality. A segment on "Illness and Sexuality" provides memorable cautionary tales of girlhood, including the story of "Aliena," who dresses as a cabin boy with near-disastrous results, and "Sharlot Wealthy," whose education focuses on enhancing her attractiveness, making her "a brainless ornament" (33). This section juxtaposes radically different ideas on controversial topics, which appeared concurrently in popular sources, thus discouraging a simplistic image of a smooth "evolution" of ideas about children. For example...

Reviewed by: Nabobs: Empire and identity in eighteenth-century Britain John W. Mackey Nabobs: Empire and identity in eighteenth-century Britain Tillman W. Nechtman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. In his 1926 book The Nabobs in England: A study of the returned Anglo-Indian, 1760–1785, historian James M. Holzman suggests that in historical memory, East India Company officials, derisively referred to as nabobs, have “survived only as the victims of glib, and often erroneous, generalization.”1 Holzman further suggests that Nabobs were no better understood in their own time. The seemingly mysterious origins of the nabobs’ fortunes, combined with an atmosphere of political cynicism in the eighteenth century meant that Britons displayed “a readiness to believe anything of the Nabobs, always provided that it was sufficiently lurid.”2 Nearly eighty-five years and numerous historiographical trends later, Tillman W. Nechtman explores the scandal and spectacle surrounding East India Company officials in his 2010 book Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. And while Holzman declared that his rather straightforward task was to understand how nabobs spent their fortunes, Nechtman’s project is a much more ambitious, revisionist history of the subject. By focusing on public perceptions of nabobs in addition to anti-nabob rhetoric among political elites, Nechtman argues that the nabob controversies illustrate the centrality of empire—and India in particular—to the fraught and contested construction of Britishness, as eighteenth-century Britons became aware that “Britain was changing the rest of the world but also that the rest of the world was changing Britain.” (21) As Nechtman’s introduction explains, the term “nabob” is an Anglicized form of the word nawab, which was a title held by regional elites within the Mughal Empire. In Britain, nabob was used as a mocking reference to East India Company officials, some of whom returned home from South Asia with new, and presumably dubious, fortunes. A series of controversies in the eighteenth century, highlighted by the government inquiry into the dealings of Robert Clive, and the nearly ten-year impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, serve as evidence of the uneasy relationship between nabobs and their fellow domestic countrymen. For Nechtman, the nabob controversies represented far more than merely internecine disputes among political elites. Rather, nabobs were viewed with popular suspicion and hostility “because they were themselves the harbingers of a globalized and imperial sense of Britishness as a consequence of the material culture they brought home with them to Britain from South Asia.” (16) The presence of nabobs and their “exotic” accouterments, Nechtman argues, made it impossible for domestic Britons to conceive of their nationhood and identity in isolation from Empire. The book contends that because nabobs were potentially corrupted by the supposed luxury, sloth, superstition, and despotism of India, the presence of nabobs in Britain represented a visible threat to “Britain’s established order—the political securities of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the religious structures of the established Protestant church, and the sense of national vigor that had fought for an achieved them all.” (91) Nechtman’s study is impressively researched and argued, and the book’s clearly written prose is divided into an introduction, five substantive chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter examines Indian travel narratives in the context of Enlightenment thinking, establishing the intellectual background to the nabob controversies. In the second chapter, Nechtman discusses imperial taxonomies and the extent to which Britons attempted to create narratives of British and Indian civilization that fit eighteenth-century concepts of stadial theory. The third chapter considers the representation of nabobs within a broader perspective, focusing on the changing nature of Britain’s global empire and its impact on the domestic scene. The fourth chapter, perhaps the most interesting, examines the material objects nabobs brought home, and the impact of this “imperial clutter” on their fellow Britons’ sense of self. Such objects, Nechtman argues, “were, to domestic audiences, unsettling declarations of the imbrication of Britain and India, empire and nation,” and as such, they were “the most solid representations of the larger intellectual problems posed by Britain’s growing prominence as an imperial power.” (146) The fifth chapter continues in this vein, but focuses...

Upright PiracyUnderstanding the Lack of Copyright for Journalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain Will Slauter (bio) When and how did written reports of current events—in other words, journalism—become recognized as a form of literary property? In Great Britain, the 1710 Act of Anne provided authors and booksellers with an exclusive right, during a limited period of time, to print, distribute, and sell their books.1 Yet the act made no mention of newspapers or other periodicals, whose status as literary property remained ambiguous well into the nineteenth century. The Literary Copyright Act of 1842 extended protection to “any Encyclopedia, Review, Magazine, Periodical Work, or Work published in a series of Books or Parts,” but disagreement about the legal status of newspapers, not to mention the individual articles they contained, persisted. In the 1830s and 1850s, when the stamp tax on newspapers was lowered and then abolished, the managers of established London dailies feared a flood of cheap papers that would copy news acquired by them at great expense. They lobbied in vain for a special copyright that would prohibit the unauthorized reprinting of news reports for a certain number of hours after initial publication.2 The Copyright Act of 1911 offered explicit protection for newspapers, but by that time copyright was generally understood to cover only the precise language of articles, not the underlying factual details that many publishers now sought to protect.3 Because the Act of Anne did not mention serial publications, and because most court cases and discussions of literary property in the eighteenth century concerned the reprinting of books, it may be tempting to assume that periodical writings simply were not covered by the statute and that writers, publishers, and readers at the time did not view them as literary property in the same way as books.4 Evidence from the register of the Company of Stationers (the official record of copyright during the eighteenth century) and from the periodicals themselves suggests a more complicated story. Rather than simply assuming that contemporaries applied different standards depending upon the material form of publications (bound books versus single [End Page 34] sheets) or the content of those publications (learned treatises versus accounts of recent events), it is necessary to study what they attempted to claim as literary property and how they attempted to do so. In his book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Adrian Johns argues convincingly for a broader history of piracy that considers the evolution of moral codes and cultural practices as well as developments in legislation and case law. Johns shows that complaints about piracy predated modern copyright laws, but also that the kinds of activity denounced as piracy have changed over time.5 In the case of eighteenth-century journalism, evidence for contemporary interest in the problem of piracy appears not so much in the formal discussions of literary property usually studied by copyright scholars (petitions to Parliament, court cases, and pamphlets) as in the occasional comments of writers, printers, booksellers, and readers. Such comments tend to be more frequent and more elaborate during periods of increased competition, whether caused by changes in legislation or innovations in publishing practice. This article highlights two such periods: the 1710s, a period of intense competition among the publishers of weekly essay sheets, and the 1730s, when the appearance of monthly magazines led to the first sustained discussion of whether periodical writings could constitute a form of literary property. The debate in the 1730s did not lead to any new legislation, but it did inspire changes in publishing strategy. Moreover, the fact that support for a copyright in journalistic texts was so limited for the rest of the eighteenth century demands explanation. At a time when literary property was the subject of numerous court battles and sustained debate in the press, why did so few people openly discuss a potential copyright in newspaper and magazine writings? What about these writings disqualified them from literary property in eighteenth-century Britain? In order to better understand the ambiguous status of periodical writings under the Act of Anne, it is important to consider the extent to which this act differed from previous regulations and the...

Reviewed by: Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Troy Bickham, and: British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 by James Watt James Mulholland Troy Bickham, Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Reaktion Books, 2020); distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press). Pp. 285, 85 halftones. $35 cloth. James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 285. $99.99 cloth. One summer afternoon, while researching in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library, I came across a memorandum book of India's first Governor-General, Warren Hastings. He lived in India since the 1770s and was an enthusiastic sampler of South Asian culture (as well as an orientalist who combined colonial governance with cultural creation). Included among his drafts of poems, notes on weather, and accounts of meetings was a recipe for chicken kebabs—he called it "Kabaub Fowl"—which called for washing the chicken in salted water, rubbing it with "corriander seed, pepper and garlick" and "juice of ginger, chicory, and figs strained through a cloth" before stuffing it with "ghee and cloves" and roasting it over a gentle fire "until it is done, & looks red."1 Delicious, no doubt, and just as likely never prepared by Hastings himself. I thought of Hastings' recipe as I read Troy Bickham's capacious account of food and empire in the eighteenth century. Bickham's reads like a cross-over: a scholarly account that popularizes sharp expertise to knowledgeable non-academic readers. His book feels at times like the synthesis of accounts, among academic and popular writers alike, which tracked commodities and their effect on the globe, including salt (Salt: A World History [2003]), tea (A Thirst for Empire [2017]), sugar (Sweetness and Power [1986]; Sugar and Civilization [2015]), coffee (Uncommon Grounds [1999]), and curry (Curry: Cooks and Conquerors [2006]).2 As with many of these other accounts, Bickham sees in the preparation, consumption, and popular representation of food an image of how empire affected Britons and an indication of empire's extraordinary reach yet often ordinary effects. He describes empire as an "ever-moving umbrella" (10) of nearly incongruous activities, some of which were under British sovereignty but others that were negotiated with others. The middle grounds, translators, and imperial brokers that have become standard metaphors of twenty-first-century studies of empire are evident in how food connected domestic Britons to imperial dominion. Bickham describes the "abundance of choice" and the rituals it created as "a language" (17) that solidified "national and regional identities" (18) in Britain but also acted as a "tool for cultural critiques" (19). Doubleness of experience pervades Eating the Empire, which is also an explanation of how the foreign and exotic was made familiar and domestic. Bickham approaches foodways in the manner of an anthropologist or sociologist—as fundamentally about the interpersonal relationships forged by empire (9). In this way, his book is an elegantly interlocking story, and is extensively illustrated, typically with satirical prints that show commodities' imperial associations, making it an engaging overarching history of food and empire. At its most important, Eating the Empire describes the transformation of empire's goods from "rare luxuries to commonplace staples" across the eighteenth century (28), which necessarily altered diets, changed social practices, and arguably [End Page 556] made the current United Kingdom what it is, with teatime and biscuits but also curries and kebabs, of the type that Hastings encountered centuries ago. During the eighteenth century, consumer choice expanded rapidly, and what was a luxury in the seventeenth century was a staple one hundred years later (56). Then, as now, the rich censured the poor for the ingestion of what was seen as above their station (54), with anxieties about tea or coffee being replaced later with worries over carbonated drinks. Throughout Eating the Empire, Bickham touches on broad changes that are formative for the present: shopping (59–60), credit (61–65), fashion and fashionability (65), social visits and visiting (67), cook books (144), and in turn the evolution of politeness and manners, especially as related to the preparation and consumption of food. Some topics, such as coffee, are familiar to most eighteenth-century studies scholars, while...

Book reviewed in this article:Romantic, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background: 1760‐ 1830. By Marilya ButlerWilliam Blake. His Art and Times. By David BindmanThe letter and Prose Writings of William Cowper. Edited By James King and Charles Ryskamp.Presences of Nature. British Landscape 1780–1830. By Louis Hawes.Cowper's Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment. By Vincent Newey.The Religious Life of Samuel Johnson. By Charles E. Pierce Jr.The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill. By G. S. Rousseau.Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810. By Emory Elliott.The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations. By Ian Donaldson.Swift at Moor Park: Problems in Biography and Criticism. By A. C. Elias.Jonathan Swift: The Brave Desponder. By Patrick Reilly.Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire. By Howard D. Weinbrot.Diderot: Le Neveu de Rameau. By Jacques ChouilletVictims, Authority and Terror: The Parallel Deaths of d'Orlkans, Custine, Bailly and Malesherbes. By George Armstrong Kelly.The Eighteenth Century Renaissance. By Prys Morgan.God's Playground. A History of Poland. By Norman Davies.Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American revolution against patriachal authority, 2750–2800. by Jay Fliegelman.Der Aufstieg des Hauses Kaunitz. By Grete Klingenstein.The Glorious Cause: the American Revolution 1763–1789. By Robert Middlekauff.Austria's Eastern Question 1700–1789. By Karl A. Roider, Jr.The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, edited by P. Langford.The Friends of Peace. Anti‐War Liberalism in England, 1793–1815. By J. E. Cookson.Interpreting the French Revolution. By Franqois Furet.Challoner and his Church. A catholic Bishop in Georgian England. By Eamon Duffy.The Political Works of Thomas Spence. Edited by H. T. Dickinson.The People's Clearance: Highland Emigration to the British North America 1770–1815. By J. W. Bumsted.The Devonshire Diary. William Cavendish Fourth Duke of Devonshire, Memoranda on State of Affairs, 1759–1762. Edited with an introduction by Peter Brown and Karl Schweizer.Clermont‐de‐Lodsve, 1633‐1 789: Fluctuations in the Prosperity of a Languedocian Cloth‐Making Town. By J. K. J. Thomson.Judicial Reform in France before the Revolution of 1789. By John Carey.Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789. By John Childs.Diary of John Quincy Adums November 1779 ‐ December 1788. By David Grayson Allen, Robert J. TaylorJacobite Estates of the Forty‐Five. By Annette M. Smith.L'Ecole des meres, comedie (1744). By P. C. Nivelle de La Chaussee. Edited by Isabelle Bernard.The Irresistible Diderot. Edited (with translations) by John Hope Mason.Pediatrie des Lumih‐es. By Daniel Teysseire.Voltuire: A Biography. By Haydn Mason.Marivaux: Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and Les Fausses Confidences. By G. E. Rodmell.Voltaire: Dictionnuire philosophique. By Christopher Todd.Diderot: La Religieuse. By Vivienne Mylne.Jean‐Jacques. The Early Life and Work of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754. By Maurice Cranston.Order and Chance: The Pattern of Diderot's Thought. By Geoffrey Bremner.Lord Bolingbroke: Contributions to the Craftsman. By Simon Varey.Schiller and the Historical Character. By Lesley Sharpe.Gesamtverzeichnis der Lessing‐Handschriften. Edited by Wolfgang Milde.Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Herausgegeben & kommentiert von Klaus L. Berghahn.Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Die Juden. Mit Dokumenten zur Entstehung und Wirkung herausgegeben von Wilhelrn Grosse.Hume's moral theory. By J. L. Mackie.Sister Peg: A Pamphlet Hitherto Unknown by David Hume. By David R. RaynorThe Private Case: an Annotated Bibliography of the Private Case Erotica Collection in the British (Museum) Library. Compiled by Patrick J. Kearney.Sexuality in Eighteenth‐Century Britain. By Paul‐Gabriel Boucé.Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early‐Nineteenth Centuries. Edited and translated by Peter Le Huray and James Day.Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in Eighteenth‐Century Germany. By Bellamy Hamilton Hosler.Music in Eighteenth‐Century England. Essays in memory of Charles Cudworth. Edited by Christopher Hogwood and Richard Luckett.

122 ample? How did they shape forms they shared with their male contemporaries— forms that have little interest for us today, but that were compelling to the entire culture of the eighteenth century (religious verse being the most significant, as well as the most obvious, example)? This outline does structure the study, but it does not point to Ms. Backscheider’s organic understanding and deep knowledge of eighteenth-century life, culture, and thought. This book could be described as a cultural biography, and it is a great strength that Ms. Backscheider draws on strategies of presentation more common to the biographer (and, of course, she is a biographer) than the literary critic or cultural historian . Early on we are fully engaged with the personalities as well as the works of Finch and Rowe. Later, the same is true of Jane Bereton and Charlotte Smith. Ms. Backscheider effectively re-creates the atmosphere in which these women lived and worked and wrote. We begin to see that the eighteenth-century world was centered on poetry more than we have ever realized—the ability to read poetry effectively is everywhere referenced, in novels, in diaries, in essays; songs are interspersed in all the plays of the time; extempore poetic composition was a feature of social life. These are things we have long known, but Ms. Backscheider’s description of the domain in which women lived and wrote makes the scene come alive. It seems life in eighteenth-century England was lived to the beat of meter and the sound of rhyme. Every student of eighteenth-century literature will want to own this book—not only for its importance as a major scholarly statement, but also for the pleasure of reading and rereading, in whole or in part. Ms. Backscheider’s incidental observations are as compelling, and as just, as her major arguments. Both books call for further work in the field. Ms. Prescott and Mr. Shuttleton emphasize the need for editions of women poets, and some of these poets are the subject of current editorial projects. Ms. Backscheider begins her book by noting that every chapter could have been the subject of a full-length study. She too ends with a call for further work: ‘‘the reassessment of Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry remains to be done.’’ Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry brilliantly introduces issues, opportunities, and new directions, that open up vistas into a vital world of complex personalities, engaging social practices, and inspiring artistic achievements. Elizabeth Kraft University of Georgia THOMAS KEYMER and PETER SABOR. Pamela in the Market Place: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge , 2005. Pp. x ⫹ 295. $85. This new book by Messrs. Keymer and Sabor is a valuable companion to their The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela , 1740–1750 (Pickering and Chatto, in six volumes, 2001), and it splendidly exemplifies what can be accomplished in the relatively new discipline of the history of the book. Although the authors refer to the Pamela controversy—and there was one—this study is concerned with something that turns out to be more neutral—the 123 Pamela phenomenon or sensation or fashion. Richardson’s correspondent Solomon Lowe shows an excellent grasp of the positive consequences for the book trade: ‘‘witness the Labours of the press in Piracies, in Criticisms, in Cavils, in Panegyrics, in Supplements, in Imitations, in Transformations, in Translations, &c, beyond anything I know of.’’ And that summary omits the plays, operas, pictures, and racehorses that were to come. The Beggar’s Opera had generated ballads and engraved fans; The Dunciad, as Pope was proud to note, had provoked extensive retaliation—but nothing had inspired such a varied volume of material. The first chapter examines the ways in which Richardson advanced the publicity of his own work. We find puffing by mouth (a sermon by Benjamin Slocock and comments from Pope); praise in a journal Richardson had printed, the Weekly Miscellany ; Aaron Hill’s letters, printed to provide the bulk of the introduction to the second edition; and Pamela-orientated verse. This material undoubtedly had an important role in provoking Shamela and could be seen as...