Augustan England Research Articles

Figures of Fictionality: Keywords of the Eighteenth- Century English Novel

Recent developments in the polyhedric field of Digital Humanities offer a desirable perspective for corpus-driven literary studies. This is mainly due to both the implementation of tools for the statistical treatment of textual data, as well as the rapid expansion of the Internet in terms of online availability of archives and collections. Notwithstanding a series of contributions highlighting the mutual benefits derived from the combination of computational methods and literary scholarship, traditional criticism seems to ignore the epistemological continuum between qualitative and quantitative approaches to literature, treating them as two separate impermeable realities. In this article I will attempt to reconcile these approaches by presenting an exercise in computational criticism about the linguistic and ideological constructions at the basis of the rising genre of Augustan England: the novel. The aim is to examine the keywords at the core of the extensively theorised modern paradigm of empirical narratives so as to disclose which lexical units may be seen as the distinctive trait of fictionality as well as those which constitute the figure of the novelistic canon. In this way, the article provides an example of how the application of quantitative methods in literary and cultural scholarship can enhance the quality of individual research in the pursuit of the validity of interpretation.

Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England by Roger Lund

Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England by Roger Lund

ROGER D. LUND. Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England.

ROGER D. LUND. Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England.

Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England by Roger D. Lund (review)

Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England by Roger D. Lund (review)

Jolly Jades, Lewd Ladies and Moral Muses

This article argues that the range of female participation in the associational culture of fraternalism in early eighteenth-century Britain—in terms of class background, social setting and moral philosophy—was surprisingly rich and varied. In effect, such a claim complements the body of work written in the past two decades, by historians such as Steve Pincus, Brian Cowan, Markham Ellis and Helen Berry, vis-à-vis the place of women in the public sphere of the coffeehouse in post-Restoration and Augustan England. This hypothesis will be developed by outlining the active involvement of women in three distinct spheres of fraternal culture in early eighteenth-century Britain. First, I will explore the manner in which women participated in or mimicked the culture of alehouse clubbing in early eighteenth-century London. Second, I will emphasize the prominent role of aristocratic ladies in mixed bacchanalian and masquerade societies, including the Order of the Horn, The Hell-Fire Club and the Gallant Schemers, that met in several notable town houses or country retreats of the English and Scottish gentry. Lastly, a study will be made of the all-female Fair Intellectual Club, which was established in May 1717 in Edinburgh.

Geoffrey Holmes and the Urban World of Augustan England

Urban history as a sub‐discipline within history began to emerge in Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s. Attention initially focused heavily on the 19th century, but the Tudor and early Stuart town also soon attracted attention. Academic interest in the post‐restoration and 18th‐century urban world emerged a little more slowly, but the closing decades of the 20th century produced a mounting volume of research on the subject. Geoffrey Holmes was one of a group of post‐war historians rewriting the history of Augustan Britain and re‐establishing its significance in the longer‐term development of the country. Though not a specialist urban historian, Holmes saw towns playing a vital part in shaping the character of the period. His research anticipated and inspired many of the facets of the rapidly‐emerging historiography on the 18th‐century town, intersecting with it in three particular areas. First, in demonstrating the important role played by towns, in particular as the home of four‐fifths of the seats in the house of commons, in the broader political system; second, in highlighting the position of London at the hub of the Augustan world; and third in revealing the part played by towns, and especially those who inhabited them, in promoting social change at the same time as securing long‐term political stability.

:The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The rise of civil courtesy and the duelling theory in Elizabethan and early Stuart England 2. The Jacobean anti-duelling campaign 3. Duelling, civility and honour in Restoration and Augustan England 4. Anti-duelling campaigns 1660-1720 5. Politeness, duelling and honour in Bernard Mandeville Epilogue Bibliography Index.

Martyrs in Low Life? Dying “Game” in Augustan England

One of the most familiar, and certainly the most colorful, of all early eighteenth-century figures is that of the ‘‘game’’ criminal—the bold and dashing highwayman or street robber who dressed like a beau, drank like a lord, and went without tears or trembling to the gallows, cheerfully playing the leading role in that most famous of Augustan performances, public execution at Tyburn. The stereotype is perhaps most vividly expressed in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical poem ‘‘Clever Tom Clinch going to be hanged.’’ During his triumphal procession from Newgate to Tyburn, Tom bows jauntily to his female admirers and stops at a tavern for a bottle of sack, promising (with true gallows humor) ‘‘to pay for it when he’d come back.’’ At the place of execution, instead of forgiving the hangman, let alone tipping him (both were customary), ‘‘Tom gave him a Kick in the Guts for his Fee,’’ assuring spectators he would ‘‘see [them] all damn’d’’ before he would ‘‘whittle’’ (betray his comrades). And so it was that with his ‘‘Conscience . . .

Two Registers of Madness in Enlightenment Britain. Part 2

In Part 1 of this essay, I argued that in Augustan and Georgian England it was widely understood that madness could have two more-or-less distinct meanings. "Moral" madness was the subject's own fault, and he/she remained accountable for actions commissioned under its effects. The "morally" mad individual's thoughts and actions were understood to be self-directed; at base, in moral madness, delusional ideas arose in the mind, and by definition remained within the moral province of the individual. By contrast, in "real" madness, the sufferer was the passive recipient of body-based sickness. Correspondingly, he/she was understood to be innocent, but paid for this exculpation of moral accountability by surrendering full personhood. In Part 2, I shall examine various ways in which eighteenth-century Britons approached and assessed insanity's two meanings. I shall then remark on the late eighteenth-century attempt to develop a psychological (i.e., moral) rendering of insanity's characteristics and its treatment.

Two registers of madness in Enlightenment Britain. Part 1

Part 1 of this essay argues that in Augustan and Georgian England it was widely understood that madness could have two more-or-less distinct meanings. 'Moral' madness was the subject's own fault, and he/she remained accountable for actions commissioned under its effects. The delusional ideas arose in the mind, and by definition remained within the moral province of the individual. By contrast, in 'real' madness, the sufferer was the passive recipient of body-based sickness, and he/she was understood to be innocent, but paid for this exculpation of moral accountability by surrendering full personhood. Part 2 of the essay examines how Georgian churchmen viewed madness, and then returns to psychiatry proper for a closer look at how certain theories of madness were inflected by the problematics of insanity's conflicting meanings. Finally, a previously unrecognized Georgian psychiatric therapy, 'classical moral treatment', is described and put in the context of the better-known Tukean 'moral treatment'.

Guilt by Association: The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England

It is a cliché of literary history that the natives of the long eighteenth century were uniquely “clubbable” men and women. As Peter Clark points out, by the mid-eighteenth century voluntary associations of all sorts had become “an essential part of the social and cultural language of urban life.” Clark chronicles the rise of coffee houses, benefit societies, lodges, fraternal organizations, and clubs of every kind. As he points out, however, while the “image and concept of the voluntary society increasingly penetrated every nook and cranny of British social and cultural life” in the eighteenth century, there was no “extended philosophical justification for the importance and freedom of voluntary associations in society.” The absence of such justifications may be traced, at least in part, to a relatively wide-spread suspicion of voluntary association as manifested in “atheist” clubs and heterodox conventicles, forms of association that figured prominently in the imagination of Augustan pamphleteers, but whose history, as Justin Champion remarks, “is obscure and little studied.” As I argue in this essay, a brief study of atheist clubs that presumably flourished in the early decades of the eighteenth century reveals a resistance on the part of High-Church Anglican pamphleteers to the growth of clubs and private associations because they presumably posed a threat to the establishment both in Church and State.

The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work

The most prolific woman writer of eighteenth century, Eliza (1693-1756?) was a key player in history of English novel. Along with her contemporary Defoe, she did more than any other writer to create a market for fiction prior to emergence of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett.Also one of Augustan England's most popular authors, came to fame in 1719 with publication of her first novel, Love in Excess. In addition to writing fiction, she was a playwright, translator, bookseller, actress, theater critic, and editor of The Female Spectator, first English periodical written by women for women. Though tremendously popular, her novels and plays from 1720s and 30s scandalized reading public with explicit portrayals of female sexuality and led others to call her the Great Arbitress of Passion.Essays in this collection explore themes such as connections between Haywood's early and late work, her experiments with form of novel, her involvement in party politics, her use of myth and plot devices, and her intense interest in imbalance of power between men and women. Distinguished scholars such as Paula Backschieder, Felicity Nussbaum, and John Richetti approach from a number of theoretical and topical positions, leading way in a crucial reexamination of her work. The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood examines formal and ideological complexities of her prose and demonstrates how Haywood's texts deft traditional schematization.

Bodleian Imbroglios, Politics and Personalities, 1701–1716: Thomas Hearne, Arthur Charlett and John Hudson

This essay is about the early career of the antiquarian scholar Thomas Hearne at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Hearne is known today for his series of editions (about 35 vols.) of English medieval chroniclers as well as for his 145-volume diary and commonplace book "Remarks and Collections", which gives a detailed account of scholary life at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Hearne was a nonjuror and a Jacobite, which meant he did not accept English governments after the "Bloodless Revolution" of 1688, and hoped for the return to the English throne of the Stuart dynasty. This political and religious position of the nonjuror minority played a great part in the difficulties Hearne met with in Oxford. Hearne's scholarship, like that of other nonjurors, was motivated by an ideology which in Augustan England became increasingly unpopular and which embarrassed the University authorities. This essay examines the events leading up to the premature end of Hearne's career at the Bodleian Library. I describe the complexity of the situation at Oxford at the time and in doing so I hope to begin to adjust the generally unsympathetic image of Hearne as a person and as a scholar.

A Band of Brothers?

In the summer of 1826 troubling news spread among upstate New York Masons. William Morgan, an apostate Brother, was planning to publish a work that revealed the secret rituals of Freemasonry. Masons, fiercely jealous of their secrets, immediately launched a campaign to prevent publication. Their efforts accelerated rapidly from pressuring Morgan's publisher to attempting to destroy the printing press to having Morgan arrested on false charges. When these and other efforts to mobilize the legal system failed, Morgan was kidnapped and never seen again, presumably killed. Despite public outrage, few of Morgan's abductors were punished, and those who were received minor sentences. Masons, it seems, used their power and influence to contain legal prosecutions and convictions. But though they protected individual Brothers, they were unable to save the larger Masonic organization. The kidnapping of William Morgan triggered a widespread debate over the rationality and power of Masonry-a debate that led to the formation of an organized Antimasonic movement and all but destroyed the public power of Freemasonry. Antimasonry was only the climax of a century long debate over the forms and privileges of Freemasonry. As Steven Bullock's learned and provocative Revolutionary Brotherhood makes clear, Masons were implicated in some of the most important controversies and conflicts of the Anglo-American age of Enlightenment and Revolution. Indeed, Bullock insists, played an important role in shaping the momentous changes that first introduced and then transformed the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in America, helping to create the nineteenth-century culture of democracy, individualism, and sentimentalism (p. vii). With Bullock as our guide, Revolutionary Brotherhood provides a challenging tour through a wide range of sometimes bewildering rituals, practices, and beliefs central to masculine gentility. Tracing the history of Masonry from its emergence in Augustan England through its colonial

Experimenters' Techniques, Dyers' Hands, and the Electric Planetarium

During the 1730s a number of fellows of the Royal Society of London worked on a device they called an "electric planetarium," which its inventor, the Kentish dyer Stephen Gray, claimed was a representation of the planetary system and showed that that system was truly driven by electricity. The Society's secretary, Cromwell Mortimer, and a distinguished French natural philosopher, Charles Dufay, sought to reproduce these phenomena. Gray's patron and successor, the Kent landowner Granvill Wheler, explored the motions of the planetarium between Gray's death in 1736 and mid 1738. Wheler eventually conceded that the device relied on unsuspected motions of his own hand that his desire for success had unconsciously produced. Since it relied on the ways of experimenters' hands, the electric planetarium allows an exploration of the body techniques of early modern natural philosophers. Gray's celebrated "knack" for producing electricity can be connected with his work as a dyer, since the techniques of dyeing were akin to those of the electric experiments. Ranges of techniques involved in these experiments drew on practices already current in the craft world of Augustan England. Dufay, too, was a master of the dye trade, and his different attitudes can also be linked with this craft culture. Relations between artisans and gentry raise problems of the status of "hands," where this term is taken both as referring to the experimenters' limbs and to their employees.

The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760, and: Children, Parents, and the Rise of the Novel, and: Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (review)

Reviewed by: The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680–1760, and: Children, Parents, and the Rise of the Novel, and: Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Jennifer Thorn Toni Bowers. The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 262. $54.95. T. G. A. Nelson. Children, Parents, and the Rise of the Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. Pp. 252. $37.50. Lynne Vallone. Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. 230. $25.00. Since Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex, and Marriage, 1500–1800, eighteenth-century family history has burgeoned as a field, with many of the assertions most closely [End Page 145] associated with Stone—such as the claims that the long eighteenth century saw the advent of the companionate marriage, affective individualism, sentimental motherhood, and reverence for childhood—receiving corroboration and contestation alike by historians of diverse specializations, such as Christopher Brooks, Lenore Davidoff, Jack Goody, Catherine Hall, Ralph Houlbrooke, Martin Ingram, Peter Laslett, Alan Macfarlane, Ferdinand Mount, Linda Pollock, Keith Wrightson, and E. A. Wrigley. Recent decades have also seen a boom in treatments of the metaphoric comparison of familial to state governance; here the best examples may be the work of Americanists Jay Fliegelman and Mary Beth Norton. In different ways, the three books under review here revisit and reconfigure this still unsettled historical terrain; together, they provide evidence of the vitality with which assertions of change and continuity in familial representations and practices are at present being debated. “Augustan discourse was preoccupied with motherhood” (14): Toni Bowers’ The Politics of Motherhood admirably succeeds in demonstrating the force and range implied by this representative statement. Bowers examines in turn three thematic clusters in which representations of motherhood were central in the contestation and codification of authority: Queen Anne; “unnaturally” cruel and neglecting mothers; and emergent ideals of domesticity, epitomized for Bowers by part 2 of Pamela. In the section “Royal motherhood: Queen Anne and the politics of maternal representation,” Bowers draws upon diverse sources to argue persuasively for a telling irony: “Anne’s considerable popularity was largely due to the fact that unlike any monarch before her, she was defined in terms of what she shared with her subjects: she was a model for women insofar as she was ordinary” (44)—an ordinariness that late in her reign contributed to her devaluation as merely pious and entirely removed from the martial feats by which English national power was consolidated and maintained. Bowers tracks the history of the cultivation—by Anne herself and by political and literary writers—of an understanding of her queenly power as essentially maternal through the births and deaths of her numerous children and through the rise of Marlborough as ambiguously both supporter and rival; she considers too the cultural and political changes that differentiated Augustan England from the earlier climate in which Elizabeth had wielded so cannily her own potentially reproductive royal body. Bowers opens the second section of Politics of Motherhood with a description of several particularly vivid examples of the many sermons, pamphlets, and fictions that dramatize “coldhearted, cruel, avaricious, cowardly, fraudulent, and lascivious” mothers, in which context she skillfully places Moll Flanders and Roxana, reading both as exposés of “the myth that mothers are fully and individually responsible for choices made in constraining and even coercive social situations, choices so overdetermined as to be inevitable” (113). Bowers juxtaposes these readings, which demonstrate the ways that material circumstances assure maternal restriction and even failure, with the vision of “successful, autonomous motherhood” that she finds in Haywood’s The Rash Resolve and The Force of Nature. It is in this section, precise in its readings and urgent in its conclusions, that Bowers most fully realizes her declared hope that her project of “historicizing motherhood” could be used “to construct future motherhood that does not necessarily entail abjection, withdrawal, or passivity” (24). The final section of the book attends closely to Pamela and Clarissa and the critical discussions that surround them. Especially interesting here are Bowers’s contextualization of the breastfeeding debate in...

Who did the work? Experimental philosophers and public demonstrators in Augustan England

The growth of modern science has been accompanied by the growth of professionalization. We can unquestionably speak of professional science since the nineteenth century, although historians dispute about where, when and how much. It is much more problematic and anachronistic to do so of the late seventeenth century, despite the familiar view that the period saw the origin of modern experimental science. This paper explores the broad implications of that problem.

"One Hawkins, A Female Sollicitor": Women Lawyers in Augustan England

"One Hawkins, A Female Sollicitor": Women Lawyers in Augustan England

Aesthetics and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters

I confess I am malicious enough to desire that the World shou'd see to how much better purpose the LADYS Travel than their LORDS, and that whilst it is surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same Tone, and stuft with the same Trifles, a Lady has the skill to strike out a New Path, and to embellish a worn-out Subject with variety of fresh and elegant Entertainment. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was well educated for a woman of her day, though largely self-taught. Her incisive intellect was attuned to the nuances of art, literature, and criticism in Augustan England. She was a contemporary of Congreve, Shaftesbury, and Addison, whose tragedy Cato she was asked to critique in manuscript, not to mention her vexed relationship with Pope. The letters she wrote throughout her long, adventurous life persistently thematize aesthetic concerns: the visual allure of sensuous surfaces as well as the hierarchies of power that complicate the relations between spectator and spectacle, aesthetic subject and aesthetic object. We have glimpsed the assumptions held by Montagu's male peers about these matters. Addison reserves the “Polite Imagination” to privileged men, dismisses “the Vulgar” and relegates “Fair ones” to the margins of the aesthetic sphere, while Shaftesbury implicitly aligns aesthetic contemplation with property ownership as masculine prerogatives. Such attitudes are the context for Montagu's innovative approach to both travel and aesthetics. Montagu's husband was appointed British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1716, affording her a rare opportunity for contact with a distant and misunderstood culture.

Literature and Crime in Augustan England (review)

Literature and Crime in Augustan England (review)