Early Eighteenth-century England Research Articles

Laughing at Hypocrisy: The Turncoats (1711), Visual Culture and Dissent in Early Eighteenth-Century England

This article considers The Turncoats (1711), an anti-Dissent graphic satire published after the Tory victory in the 1710 General Election. The print ridiculed the hypocrisy of those Dissenters who abandoned their principles and conformed to the Church of England after that election, and pointed to the pervasiveness of religious hypocrisy in early eighteenth-century England more generally. This article contextualizes the print within the tense religious and political rivalries that developed after the 1688 Revolution and the trial of Henry Sacheverell. The Turncoats’ ridicule resonated because it built on older traditions of stereotypes in anti-popery and anti-puritanism, which used mockery to attack those perceived to be hypocrites. Mockery is analyzed by considering how early modern culture understood laughter. It is argued that ridicule in The Turncoats expressed superiority over hypocrites by subjecting them to contempt and provided relief from anxieties about the prevalence of hypocrisy during the rage of parties.

The Making of Balance-of-Power—Power Asymmetry, Domestic Politics, and the Making of Balancing Practices

Abstract This article joins the growing body of literature that perceives balance of power as a social construct containing shared understandings that comprise states’ repertoire of balancing practices. Distinct repertoires of balancing have prevailed in different international orders. We build on this work and focus on a less explored, though important, political process to explain the variation in balancing practices over time. We suggest that external threats, domestic considerations of key states, and diffusion mechanisms deriving from hierarchical relations can explain the evolution of balancing practices. More specifically, we suggest that balancing practices evolve in the domestic arena of the dominant state at a given time, as leaders frame their foreign policy in terms that most closely resonate with their domestic circumstances. Secondary states, who depend on the dominant state for their security, will tend to adopt its balancing practice. They will do so because the hierarchy of the international system enables the dominant state to use positive and negative leverage tools to pressure them, or because they voluntarily calculate that this choice will enhance their security. To demonstrate the importance of studying the social construction of balancing practices and the impact of dominant states on the content of these practices, we examine two central case studies of different balancing practices—the rise of early eighteenth-century Britain and the emergence of the logic of a contrived balance of power, and the rise of American hegemony in the aftermath of World War II that generated the practice of ideological balancing

Correction to “‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in the Early Eighteenth Century England”

Correction to “‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in the Early Eighteenth Century England”

The Realities of Toleration: Army Chaplaincy, Religious Politics and Scottish Military Experience, c.1690–1763

This article examines the under-studied practical implications of legal toleration and the realities of religious co-existence, by exploring how Scottish army chaplains pushed at confessional dividing lines and tested the differing toleration systems within the British Isles to their limits. By situating army chaplaincy at the centre, rather than the margin, of the wider religio-political changes in early eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, it argues that the deficiency of chaplaincy resulted not from individual neglect, but its legal juxtaposition between the religious and military authorities, an institutional position that both reflected and amplified church-state tensions. Such jurisdictional ambiguity was gradually clarified by the mid-eighteenth century, when Scottish army chaplains, as military personnel, came under the effective control of lay patronage. Despite persistent concerns for chaplains' doctrinal orthodoxy at the individual and local levels, Presbyterian chaplains became increasingly Moderate in outlook, which had implications for soldiers' spirituality. Similar to the patronage disputes between Moderate appointees and their Evangelically-minded parishioners in Scottish localities, chaplains and soldiers also diverged in their religious character. Accordingly, the fact that chaplaincy posts were more easily given to the Moderates frustrated pious soldiers, who held on to their confessional identities even when the eighteenth-century British army, and the various religious landscapes across the Atlantic in which they served, became an assuredly pluralistic and porous spiritual environment.

Karen Harvey. The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England.

In 1726, a young female laborer in a rural English town began giving birth to rabbits. In the weeks and months that followed, her case became a national sensation. It caught the attention of the English medical establishment, the king, and the general public. After seven weeks of examination, observation, and reporting, the births were declared false. Charges were brought against Mary Toft for deception, then eventually dropped. But the case hardly ended there. Toft did not fade back into obscurity, because the story had an afterlife in both popular culture and in scholarship. The case of Mary Toft is certainly not unknown. It formed a centerpiece, for example, of Lisa Cody’s masterful account of the intersections between reproductive knowledge, gender, and nationality (Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons, 2008). In Karen Harvey’s hands, Mary Toft’s story provides an opportunity to take a deep dive into a young woman’s reproductive experiences and to reconstruct the political, social, and cultural world of early eighteenth-century England in a way that is accessible to a general audience. The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England is testament to the enduring value of microhistory, to the importance of personal experience in historical narrative, and to the benefits of reading deeply into and against the grain of the archive.

Two Concepts of Moderation in the Early Enlightenment

ABSTRACT This essay proposes a bifurcation within the concept of moderation in early modern Europe. To draw this out it reconstructs an “encounter” between two citizens of the scholarly Republic of Letters in the years around 1700—Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Jean Le Clerc—and the concept of moderation each maintained. It proposes that the former maintained an ideal of moderation which was “hard” principally about self-regulation, while the latter maintained an ideal of moderation which was “soft” and principally about (religious) toleration. It then attaches this “encounter” to an analogous conflict between uses of moderation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. It concludes by proposing that this bifurcation, while occurring within scholarly and theological debates, has enduring significance for our interpretation of the Enlightenment, and for the passage of political moderation into the modern world.

Beauty, Voice, and Wit: Learning Courtship and Sex through Song in Early Eighteenth-Century England

Beauty, Voice, and Wit: Learning Courtship and Sex through Song in Early Eighteenth-Century England

The Myth of Rape in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Rape as propaganda is the main focus of this study. Feminist scholars and activists have investigated rape in English history and discussed how this term was used by men to dominate women and spread fear amongst them. The patriarchal society of the early eighteenth-century England used rape in order to limit the freedom of female movement. Women were led to believe that their state of safety lies within their willingness to trade submission to a man for protection from all other men. This study investigates attitudes of rape and near rape attempts which were used in three seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts; Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), and Frances Burney’s novel Evelina (1778). These attitudes were presented in order to portray different ideas such as a critique of the patriarchal society, to warn women of the dangers they might face out of the domestic sphere and perks of abiding by the social conduct, and also to encourage women to follow the mandates expected of women of quality. These three text are evidence that rape was commonly discussed as a method to warn women to keep out of public space prior to the nineteenth century.

Patricians, plebeians and parishioners: parish elections and social conflict in eighteenth-century Chelsea

ABSTRACT This article sheds new light on social relations in early eighteenth-century Britain through a case study of three parish elections held in Chelsea between 1708 and 1723. The results of these elections were disputed in the ecclesiastical courts, generating over 400 folio pages of witness depositions. These depositions reveal a sustained conflict between the local gentry and the middling sort over control of parish offices. At the heart of this conflict was a contest over who could be considered an independent voter. Independence was the central quality required for participation in parish politics and was thought to belong exclusively to heads of household who contributed to local taxes. In election disputes, each side claimed that their opponents’ supporters failed to meet these criteria and that they had benefited from the votes of people who were too poor to make independent political choices. By arguing over voter independence, Chelsea residents contested the boundary between ‘parishioners’ with a right to participate in local government and the poor who were excluded by their dependence on others. Parish elections were both manifestations of social hierarchy and key sites of social conflict.

The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England by Alison C. DeSimone

The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England by Alison C. DeSimone

‘Monsters are they in Nature’: Female Masturbation and Constructions of Femininity in the Early Eighteenth Century England

AbstractSerious alarm about female masturbation first emerged during a transitional period for beliefs on female sexuality. This article examines the gender history of masturbation through the shifting constructions of femininity at work in early anti‐masturbation discourse. While the founding work of the anti‐masturbation campaign (Onania, 1716) portrayed female autoeroticism as a significant concern, existing scholarship pays limited attention to how anti‐masturbation sentiment interacted with early modern femininities. This article explores this conflicted relationship in the early years of the movement, with a comparative analysis of how Onania and one of its most vocal critics portrayed female masturbation. Onania, which stemmed from a traditional paradigm of negative femininity, regarded all women as innately lustful and likely to masturbate. Onania Examined, and Detected, a critical tract embracing the increasingly dominant paradigm of positive femininity, denounced these claims as an unacceptable slur on female virtue. Nevertheless, its characterisation of the female masturbator reveals the continuing influence of traditional misogyny, with negative femininity repurposed as a deviation from a naturalised virtuous norm. This close analysis of early anti‐masturbation discourse reveals the cultural process of navigating a transitional phase in the construction of gender, which addressed old anxieties by incorporating them into a new paradigm.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

From Royalty to Riots: Nation and Class in the Reception of French Musical Theater in London

From Royalty to Riots:Nation and Class in the Reception of French Musical Theater in London Erica Levenson (bio) Of the many foreigners to thrive on the early eighteenth-century London stage, George Frideric Handel has most consistently garnered the attention of scholars.1 Yet alongside Handel's now canonic opere serie, more ephemeral, light-hearted entertainments flourished in the margins of high culture. When French acting troupes from Paris arrived in London in 1718, they quickly became showstoppers. Their repertoire had been shaped predominantly in Paris's fairground theaters, but also in the city's official theatrical institutions—the Comédie-Italienne and the Comédie-Française. Their performances blended music with dance and acrobatics with spoken comedy and often revolved around the stock characters from commedia dell'arte. Over the next two decades, French acting troupes, consisting of up to seventy members, performed nearly two hundred distinct musical comedies in London.2 While French dancers and commedia dell'arte actors had been employed on London stages for afterpieces in decades prior, the troupes that performed between 1718 and 1738 became more than addons to the main theatrical attraction and could command the stage for an entire evening.3 Offering an average of four different programs of theatrical entertainments per week, theirs was a fast-changing, ephemeral repertoire that was performed entirely in French. The troupes did not regularly perform [End Page 141] at the London equivalent of the Paris fair theaters, but rather at the official theaters used for serious dramas and operas, including Lincoln's Inn Fields and the King's Theatre. As a result, the royal family and London's aristocratic elite were often in attendance at their performances. Given Britain's ongoing tense political relationship with France throughout the eighteenth century, one might assume that Londoners' predominant attitude towards the French performers was one of antagonism, especially since Britain and France had recently emerged from a twenty-five-year period of war.4 However, the troupes' reception in London was not so clear-cut. It is true that they were condemned, belittled, and often parodied by many members of the "middling sort," a wide-ranging group that included "yeomen, financially independent trades, and knowledge-based professions."5 However, the French performers found great appeal among London's elite and even gained patronage from the British royalty. Their twenty years of successful trips to London were in large part due to this royal support. This article examines the reactions to the French troupes within the context of the rapid social changes of early eighteenth-century England. Chief among these transformations was a growing concern with social hierarchy, which developed during the 1720s and 30s in response to an increasingly unified ruling elite and the growth of the middling orders.6 These changes eventually led to a heightened awareness of "social class" as a principle for describing the hierarchical nature of British society.7 Although England had long been divided along lines of rank and aristocratic privilege, many eighteenth-century commentators began to see "class" as something that could be gained or lost; it thus could be performed, emulated, or even bought, resulting in new anxieties surrounding status.8 In response to these changing social norms, French musical comedies were interpreted as both high- and low-style entertainment once they were imported to England, depending largely on who was watching. For elites, attendance at the French plays could signal prestige and demonstrate their nuanced grasp of foreign culture. But among the middling orders the craze for French theater was indicative of widespread trends for consuming foreign luxuries that they believed would destabilize native English culture. Thanks to this divergent reception across social strata, the French performances became divorced from their earlier position at the lower end of the hierarchy of Parisian theatrical institutions.9 Through this process of reinterpretation, the French performances helped to enact a mutable sense of class identity in ways that both negated and reinforced ideas of what France could represent in the transnational imagination. [End Page 142] The Royal Treatment The widespread success of the French performers in the years 1718–38 depended, at least in part, on the support of the...

Fair Trade and the Political Economy of Brandy Smuggling in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain*

Abstract Thomas Ellis, merchant of London, never expected he would be prosecuted for participating in one of the largest commercial frauds of his time. So when the Customs seized his brandy in 1731 he fought back. His case would influence parliamentary decision-making and reveal the extensive involvement of merchants in illicit trade. Ellis’s argument that he was merely a ‘fair trader’ also illuminates the moral debate over smuggling during the period as governments sought to legitimize and enforce their trading rules and tariffs. Pressured by competition from professional smugglers and the revenue demands of the state, merchants responded by developing their own rules by which they could fairly compete. Ellis’s story, and the ‘Flemish scheme’ it exposed, thereby shed light on the moral economy of early modern capitalism, the history of smuggling, and the dynamic of market ordering by increasingly assertive states.

Falling from horses: medical controversy in early eighteenth-century England

AbstractOn Tuesday, 12 April 1726, Robert Worger fell from his horse at Barnham Down, Kent, hitting his head on the ground ‘with strong Force’. Unconscious, he was taken to Bridge, a nearby village, and laid out at the home of Sarah Knot, ‘Nurse and Landlady to the Patient’, bled several times, given ‘volatile mixture’ (ammonia, salt, opium) and treated with purgatives and clysters. He vomited as many as five times over the course of his illness and delivered ‘half a score [of] very foul, stinking, loose Stools’. Worger died, ‘without … Agony’, at 5 am, Thursday, 21 April 1726, after living for 8 days in the care of Knot, his wife, two surgeons, an assistant, an apothecary and two physicians, Christopher Packe and John Gray. An autopsy was performed – the next night, by the light of a single candle – and, although there was little extravasation and no severe fractures or depressions in the skull, slight abnormalities were found: the cerebellum ‘Turgid with Blood’, two small fissures appeared on the os frontis. Worger’s illness and death spurred months of rebarbative public controversy: in order to exonerate themselves, both physicians published pamphlets and letters, secured affidavits, importuned surgeons and Worger’s relatives for support, vied for authority and mastery over the circumstances of the case and argued about propriety, professionalism and conduct. This paper explores Worger’s case – controversy about diagnosis and prognosis, concern with ‘knowledge and deportment’, with the status of medical offices and medical jurisprudence and with relationships between physicians, patients, surgeons – as an instance of learned medical controversy in early eighteenth-century England.

‘Plainly of Considerable Moment in Human Society’: Francis Hutcheson and Polite Laughter in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

AbstractThis article focuses on Francis Hutcheson'sReflections Upon Laughter, which was originally published in 1725 as a series of three letters toThe Dublin Journalduring his time in the city. Although rarely considered a significant example of Hutcheson's published work,Reflections Upon Laughterhas long been recognised in the philosophy of laughter as a foundational contribution to the ‘incongruity theory’ – one of the ‘big three’ theories of laughter, and that which is still considered the most credible by modern theorists. The article gives an account of Hutcheson's text but, rather than evaluating it solely as an explanation of laughter, the approach taken is an historical one: it emphasises the need to reconnect the theory to the cultural and intellectual contexts in which it was published and to identify the significance of Hutcheson's arguments in time and place. Through this, the article argues that Hutcheson's theory of laughter is indicative of the perceived significance of human risibility in early eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland and, more broadly, that it contributed both to moral philosophical debate and polite conduct guidance.

Medicine, connoisseurship, and the animal body.

This essay reconsiders the links between medicine, connoisseurship, and aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. Taking a satire on the body of the physician and collector John Woodward as its starting point, I show that medicine and connoisseurship shared a deep preoccupation with the possibility that the animal body could excessively influence the workings of the mind. Pursuing this line of argument, moreover, I will reconsider the place of mind-body dualism in eighteenth-century British medicine and aesthetics. With the exception of materialists such as the philosopher-physician Bernard Mandeville, medics and aesthetic theorists tended to identify the exercise of judgment with the operations of a disembodied mind, unsullied by the embodied mechanisms of the lower body. In practice, however, the insistence that the most refined forms of judgment depended on the presence and activity of a disembodied, immaterial soul was less meaningful than it seems. When confronted by failures of judgment, medics and connoisseurs alike sought explanations in the mechanisms of the animal body. Whether or not they believed in the immateriality of the soul, they pictured the mind as a malfunctioning animal machine, to be cured through the material agency of medical therapeutics.

A Black Tory Abolitionist in Early America: Phillis Wheatley’s Republican Poetics

ABSTRACT The first African-American to publish a book, Phillis Wheatley has long been disparaged, by eighteenth-century slave owners and twentieth-century leftists alike, as ‘a third rate imitation of Alexander Pope’. No one, however, seems to have taken very seriously what the obvious presence of Pope in Wheatley’s poetry might mean, and this is the question the following article explores. Pope belonged to a conservative neo-classical cultural movement that was united by its opposition to the capitalist modernity emerging in early eighteenth-century England, and Wheatley draws from and in the process boldly reinvents the aesthetics and thought of this movement in order both to reiterate its republican values and to illuminate their abolitionist and indeed socialist potential.

When Lighthouses became Public Goods: The Role of Technological Change.

A comparison of the French and English lighthouse systems reveals the benefits of state intervention in technological development. The French system, funded by the state, produced major innovations such as the Fresnel lens, and was the first to achieve comprehensive sea-coast lighting. The English system, dominated by private ownership early on, failed to either develop or invest in these innovations. The comparison also sheds light on the emerging category of the public good. Economist Ronald Coase has questioned the lighthouse's longstanding position as a canonical example of the public good by arguing that in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, lighthouses were successfully provided by a private market. Yet his argument ignored the fact that technological changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth century transformed not only the cost and effectiveness of lighthouses, but also their function, economic role, and potential for excludability.

Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650–1750 by Melissa Schoenberger

Reviewed by: Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650–1750 by Melissa Schoenberger Courtney Weiss Smith Melissa Schoenberger, Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650–1750 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 188; 5 illus. $34.95 paper. Cultivating Peace is a fascinating book about Virgil's didactic agricultural poem The Georgics and the poetry and political thinking that it inspired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Melissa Schoenberger recovers, from Virgil's poem, a distinctively georgic understanding of peace as mutable and contingent. Peace and war are made of the same stuff, involve the same energies: as Virgil showed, plowshares can and do turn to swords. Peace is not a permanent [End Page 525] state—it requires cultivation, constant laborious vigilance against the forces of disorder that it always threatens to dissolve back into. Cultivating Peace features exceptionally sensitive readings of these ideas and attitudes in English poetry by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Anne Finch, and John Philips. These poets turned to Virgil, even heightening the darker and more uncertain notes in his work, as they tried to make sense of their own political realities. Even as Schoenberger's is, then, a book about English poetry and classical reception, it is also about the complex contours of thinking about peace. I highly recommend it to scholars of the period's poetics and classical inheritances but also of the period's politics. As Schoenberger reminds us, Queen Anne herself invoked Virgil's understanding of war's close relation to peace, in her speech about the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713: peace is here, Queen Anne declared, so now let "the Arts of Peace . . . be cultivated" (1). After an introduction that usefully outlines these ideas and their political contexts in both ancient Rome and late seventeenth-century England, the bulk of the book tracks these ideas at work in important English poems through beautiful, intensive, close readings. Chapter one explores Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," attending closely to its attitudes toward mutability and impermanence. Marvell's poem is not obviously georgic—it works within the conventions of country house poetry—but, Schoenberger argues convincingly, it operates in a georgic mode in ways more fundamental than the mere depiction of agricultural labor. Marvell learned from Virgil a way of thinking about the proximity of peace to war, an understanding of how easily the one can become the other. She explains, "By holding up and then rejecting various forms of ostensibly perfect peace, Marvell suggests that the stability of the estate, continuously made and maintained, offers the most viable form of lasting peace in a time of grave uncertainty" (38). Chapter two explores how Dryden's influential 1697 translation amplifies some of the complexities surrounding the idea of peace in Virgil's poem. Very much rooted in its own time and place, Dryden's translation of The Georgics recognizes both that the absence of war is not the same as peace and that a return to an idealized Golden Age peace is impossible. Dryden is suspicious of any peace imposed from the top, of a politicians' peace. Rather, with a muted kind of hope aware of all the problems, Dryden offers up only the farmer: transmuting the energies of war into cultivation, working hard to produce fruit from land still marked with battle scars. Chapter three—my favorite—focuses on Finch's georgic themes, showing that she took from Virgil an understanding that peace, productivity, and pleasurable retreat all require labor to achieve and are always subject to dangerous forces of chaos or destruction. Virgil had offered the image of the rower, working his way painfully upstream but swept backward the moment he rests. In Schoenberger's brilliant reading, this "sense of threat . . . undergirds the poem's didactic premise": refusing to make "promises about the chances of achieving a prosperous life as a farmer," Virgil "offer[s] only history and precepts—often couched in future-tense, subjunctive or imperative verbs—leaving open the question of whether anyone will heed them" (94, 104). Finch's "Petition for an Absolute Retreat" is not didactic but similarly offers subjunctives and imperatives to create both "a vision and a supplication" (93). And, keenly...