Eighteenth-century England Research Articles

Subtle Social Critique in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer

Subtle Social Critique in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer

Intersections of Identity: Race, Legacy, and Belonging, within Caryl Phillips’s Historical Narrative “Dr Johnson’s Watch” as Part of Three English Lives

This essay examines Caryl Phillips’s portrayal of the historical figure Francis Barber. This formerly enslaved person rose to become the companion and heir of Samuel Johnson, the renowned lexicographer and writer. Phillips’s narrative, ‘Dr. Johnson's Watch,’ encapsulates two pivotal episodes from Barber’s life: his poignant attendance at Johnson's funeral in Westminster Abbey and his encounter with an unnamed narrator years later in Lichfield. Through these episodes, Phillips delves into profound themes of race, identity, belonging, and legacy against the backdrop of eighteenth-century England, a society entrenched in slavery and colonialism. The essay offers a nuanced literary analysis of the complex relationship between Johnson and Barber, both of whom existed as outsiders within their own contexts. It prompts reflection on the representation and agency of black individuals in history and literature, grappling with the challenges and opportunities they confronted in a largely hostile and indifferent society. At its thematic core lies Johnson’s watch, symbolising the enduring connections between individuals of diverse backgrounds and underscoring the legacy of figures like Johnson in advocating against the injustices of slavery. Through Phillips's narrative, the essay elucidates the intricate dynamics of race, power, and belonging in English society, shedding light on the struggles faced by immigrants and marginalized individuals during this tumultuous period. Ultimately, ‘Dr. Johnson’s Watch’ serves as a powerful testament to the humanity and dignity of Barber and other foreigners, inviting readers to contemplate the enduring impact of historical figures in advocating for justice and equality.

Prayer for Family and Friends: The Body and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract This article explores how writers, predominantly adhering to a variety of different Christian denominations but also including Jewish writers, discussed religion and the body in letters throughout the long eighteenth century. It draws on a corpus of over 2,500 familiar letters written by men and women of different denominations between 1675 and 1820. That these letters were not chosen because of their religious content makes them a good ‘test’ of the role of faith in everyday understandings of the body. This article underscores the continued centrality of religious discourse and devotional practice in eighteenth-century everyday life. Our research finds that religion was a commonplace register deployed when discussing bodily matters throughout the long eighteenth century. Significantly, this was the case for individuals who otherwise made scant reference to their faith. Discussion of the physical body encouraged recourse to providence, a public discussion of doctrine, and the shared expression of devotion. The ongoing force of religion in people’s lives was thus intimately tied to their embodied experiences. Letters not only expressed but actively maintained this widely shared religious framework for understanding the body.

Alexander Wakelam. Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England. An Economic History of Debtors’ Prisons. [Perspectives in Economic and Social History, Vol. 61.] Routledge, London [etc.] 2021. xi, 253 pp. £97.50. (Paper, E-book: £29.24.)

Alexander Wakelam. Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England. An Economic History of Debtors’ Prisons. [Perspectives in Economic and Social History, Vol. 61.] Routledge, London [etc.] 2021. xi, 253 pp. £97.50. (Paper, E-book: £29.24.)

'A sad inheritance of misery': the cultural life of hereditary scrofula in eighteenth-century England.

This essay argues that scrofula was one of several disorders, including gout, rickets, and venereal disease, that were 'rebranded' as hereditary in response to broader cultural changes that took place during the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. While the purposes of scrofula's recategorisation were more political than medical, they resulted in this heretofore relatively obscure childhood ailment assuming a new prominence within both medical and popular discourses of the period. Scrofula became both emblem and proof of the links between sexual promiscuity, financial profligacy, and physiological degeneration, its symbolic status reinforced by the legal and moral language used to model processes of hereditary transmission. By likening the inheritance of scrofula to the inheritance of original sin-or, more commonly, to the inheritance of a 'docked entail' or damaged estate-eighteenth-century writers and artists not only made this non-inherited ailment into a sign of catastrophic hereditary decline; they also paved the way for scrofula to be identified as a disease of aristocratic vice, even though its association with crowded, unsanitary living conditions likely made it more common among the poor. By the same token, financial models of disease inheritance facilitated a bias toward paternal transmission, with scrofula often portrayed as passing, like a title or an estate, from father to son rather than from mother to daughter.

Relativism in the British and French Enlightenment

Abstract: Long neglected, the history of relativism has been the topic of a number of surveys in recent years. These studies, however, have been ambivalent on whether relativism really existed in the eighteenth century. Following Isaiah Berlin’s contention that the eighteenth-century witnessed the emergence of pluralism rather than relativism, historians have concluded that the Enlightenment at best prefigured nineteenth-century developments in relativistic thinking. In response, this article argues that relativism was a recognizable thesis in eighteenth-century Britain and France. Its principles and consequences were frequently articulated, either to be rejected or defended, by a wide range of philosophers and imaginative authors, from Ralph Cudworth and Ann Radcliffe to Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Alberto Radicati. This neglected chapter in the history of relativism, I argue, matters for several strands in eighteenth-century studies, as it inflected Enlightenment reflections on aesthetic and moral values, human hierarchies, and cross-cultural relations.

The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Tawny Paul (review)

The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Tawny Paul (review)

Against Literary Property: Arthur Murphy and the Copyright Metaphor in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract: This essay reexamines the framing of copyright as "literary property" in eighteenth-century England through the figure of Arthur Murphy, one of the period's most successful playwrights, who was also legal counsel in two of the century's major copyright cases. Through analysis of Murphy's legal manuscripts alongside his literary works and theatrical career, I argue that Murphy fought against literalizing the property metaphor. By doing so, he aimed to protect the creative rights of authors and the good of the public.

Designers, makers, influencers: the contribution of William Halfpenny and Thomas Chippendale to the development English Chinoiserie furniture design

The term Chinoiserie, i.e. the tendency to incorporate elements of Chinese culture into European art and architecture, redefined the concept of style in seventeenth-century France and influenced the aesthetic formation of European arts and design in the century that followed. The term became particularly popular in England, as it was also associated with the need for renewal after the excessive ornamentation, elaborate symbolism and intense theatricality of Baroque, as well as the aesthetic and ideological perfection of Classicism. As early as the first half of the eighteenth century, the architect and designer William Halfpenny (1723-1755) showed a keen interest and skill in the transition from classical design to the mysterious Chinese motifs, contributing thus to the stylistic formation of English Chinoiserie, especially in the field of architecture and by extension furniture design. His experimentally pioneering approach through his publications was the beginning of a new aesthetic and ideological era that had a catalytic effect on the shaping of the design concept, taste and construction techniques of the equally important English furniture designer, Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779).    This research aims to highlight the establishment of Chinese culture and aesthetics,  known as Chinoiserie, in the eighteenth-century England, as regards the formation of furniture design, through the pattern books and design experimentation of William Halfpenny, as well as the inspired publications and the manufacturing mastery of Thomas Chippendale.

De lunatico inquirendo: managing family inheritance across madness in eighteenth-century London.

An 'inquisition' (or inquiry) held before a Justice of the Peace was the primary instrument for management of lunacy in eighteenth-century England. Yet its purpose was to protect wealth rather than the individual. The 1766 case book of Dr John Monro, London's leading doctor for madness, unexpectedly records a consultation that links two siblings who both had inquisitions. Nicholas Jeffreys' only son was attested lunatic in 1744: to circumvent inheritance through primogeniture, Jeffreys directed the family wealth to his last living child. One of his three daughters married Lord Camden, a former Lord Chancellor: after her and her second sister's deaths, the last-surviving sister was also placed under inquisition in 1780, to ensure the inheritance for his own family.

Wesley and the People Called Papists: Recusancy, Methodism, and Religious Tension in Eighteenth-Century Britain

ABSTRACT Scholarly interest in Wesley’s views of Catholicism and his conceptions of catholicity has increased significantly. This article examines how British Catholics, especially Bishop Richard Challoner of London and Fr Arthur O’Leary of Cork, engaged with Methodism in late Georgian Britain. Despite the proscribed status of the Catholic Church during this period, Catholics participated to an impressive degree in the controversies surrounding Methodism by defining themselves against Wesley both theologically and politically. Their actions aroused considerable interest and controversy, thus demonstrating the vitality of the Catholic community in an age when the Anglican confessional state was under considerable pressure.

Anti-Methodism and Theological Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England: The Struggle for True Religion

Anti-Methodism and Theological Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England: The Struggle for True Religion

Performing Majesty and National Identity: The Case of Illuminations, c. 1780–1810

Abstract: This essay explores how Britishness was performed in the streets of eighteenth-century Britain during the festive spectacles associated with the "majesty" that Linda Colley has powerfully identified as an agent of national identity in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 . I examine the significance of patriotic illuminations as performances of national identity. Throughout the eighteenth century, the revelry surrounding illuminations was a persistent feature of British political and popular culture. Illuminations, I argue, were complicated instances of local and national celebration that divided communities in as many ways as they united them. Teasing out this relationship is central to our understanding of how Britishness was navigated in a socially stratified society. Drawing primarily on the newspapers of the period, this essay explores the contexts of royal illuminations, the nature of the disorders that often accompanied illuminations, and the content of the devices used in illuminations in order to unpack the significance of this important, but relatively neglected social practice.

Constructing Identities and Negotiating Relationships in Late Eighteenth-century England

During the eighteenth century, language became an increasingly valuable commodity for the construction of identities and the negotiation of relationships with others. Additionally, letter writing had emerged as a crucial means of maintaining relationships and forging deeper intimacy between individuals, and correspondence thus constitutes a rich resource for the study of language variation and change in relation to (social) identity, with forms of address as a key strategy in this respect. The current paper examines expressions of direct address and self-reference in Late Modern English ego-documents, more specifically two sets of letters involving Mary Hamilton (1756–1816), sub-governess at Court and a member of the Bluestocking circle. For each set, we discuss intra-speaker variation in the context of both the individual participants involved and the structure of the letters. The findings reveal different strategies through which Hamilton and her correspondents construct their identities and negotiate their relationships with each other, for example by using nicknames and terms of endearment, omitting signatures, or through changes in lexical choices over time.

The Foods of Love? Food Gifts, Courtship and Emotions in Long Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract This article rediscovers the importance of food gifts in navigating the process of courtship in England during the long eighteenth century. Studies of courtship and gift-exchange to date have demonstrated how courting couples exchanged a wide range of gifts to produce and intensify feelings of love and advance their relationships toward the altar, from garters and gloves to ribbons, rings, portrait miniatures and locks of hair. Yet the edible gift has remained conspicuously absent from this picture. The article reinserts edible tokens into the historiography of love and marriage, revealing how they operated as an indispensable and unique part of the ‘gift mode’ during courtship. It demonstrates how courting couples exchanged a wide range of foodstuffs from cakes and sweetmeats to game, fowl, fish, exotic fruits and home-grown produce. In doing so, the article advances the burgeoning field of emotions and material culture by demonstrating how organic or perishable items could function as powerful emotional objects, able to nourish the human body, provide a source of sensual and gustatory pleasure and elicit feelings of joy, delight, love and desire. In turn, these gifts show courtship made everyday, transacted between couples and their families, and situated in gardens and squares, shops, theatres and around a family's tea table.

Amorous Encounters in the Satirical Print Culture of the Eighteenth-Century London Masquerade

Masquerades dominated the culture of polite urban entertainment in eighteenth-century England, summoning London’s bon ton to engage in dancing, dining, role-playing, and conversation while in disguise. The anonymity and enticement provided by masks and costumes turned the masquerade into a frequent narrative frame for the depiction of amorous encounters and assignations in Georgian literary and visual culture, especially in relation to women’s behavior, morality, and presence in the public sphere during the nascent cult of sensibility. Satirical prints, widely consumed at this time, found this topic a particularly appealing one for the Georgian public’s taste, denouncing and disseminating masquerade’s moral perils for women. This article explores amorous encounters associated with the space of the masquerade as represented in Georgian print culture and how such visual narratives employed the figure of the female masquerader to define models of respectable or deviant femininity. 

Femalization of the Genre of Literature; Novel Owners of the Novel

Unfairly female authors have been deprived of the title of “mothers” of English Novel and “fathers” have been taken as the sole male owners of the Novel. While not only the first professional novelist was a woman but the numbers of female novelists exceed that of the males. Female authors indefatigably undertook the process of femalization the genre of literature and the current study conducted through the qualitative research and text-analysis methods together with historical approach tried to put light to the fact that how female novelists contributed to the great genre of literature and strengthen it due to their fairness and their gender as well as their treatment of their subject. Aphra Behn penned Oroonoko of 1688 much earlier than Danial Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of 1719. The purpose of this paper has, by no means, been to convert female writers from the lower novelists to higher ones. However, under the strict social conventions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century England, there had been buried some masterpieces of literary works which need to be delivered again to the world of literature, the negligence of which is a loss and the revival of which is a gain to both consumers and producers of literary works.

Gender Dynamics, Social Norms, and Erotic Attitudes in Eighteenth-Century England: A Comparative Study of Anti-Pamela and Fanny Hill

This paper examines two influential novels of the 18th century, Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela and John Cleland's Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, to offer insights into the social norms, gender roles, and erotic attitudes of the time. Through a comparative analysis of the two works, this paper highlights their distinct literary traditions, concerns, and perspectives on the issues of eroticism, virtue, and gender relations. The study finds that while Haywood's Anti-Pamela critiques the excesses of the materialistic and libertine culture of the time, Cleland's Fanny Hill challenges the concept of virtue and decorum by emphasizing the complexities of human erotic desire. The paper argues that the two works offer unique and valuable perspectives on the social and cultural landscape of 18th century England, contributing to the ongoing debates on gender, social inequality, and erotic exploitation. This study provides a better understanding of the literary and cultural history of the 18th century and its relevance to contemporary discussions on the issues of gender and eroticism.

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

Constructing the Infant Body: The Intervention of the Educated, Male Physician in Eighteenth-Century Infant Diet

Drawing on medical advice literature, this paper examines the cultural history of the body in infancy in eighteenth-century England. This period saw the increasing professionalization of the medical field, particularly regarding children’s health, as an emerging profession of educated, male physicians sought to establish their exclusive authority on the medical market. As England’s medical market of the time was largely unregulated, these educated physicians competed with apothecaries, midwives, and female nurses for paying customers. Physicians argued that the disorderly, undisciplined nature of the infant body was incongruent with Enlightenment virtues, and therefore required a greater degree of medical management. Emerging out of this discourse were popular advice books which emphasized preventative measures in already-healthy infant patients. They were authored by a growing profession of educated, medical experts and were addressed to a lay audience of parents and child caretakers. This paper examines three immensely popular pamphlets authored by three physicians, Thomas Beddoes, George Armstrong, and William Cadogan. All three emphasized in their tracts the importance of maternal breastfeeding to the infant diet, citing Enlightenment ideals, humoral theory, and even the supernatural elements of breastmilk to support this claim. To bring the child body firmly under the control of the medical establishment, they argued that uneducated, lay practitioners, who were overwhelmingly female, received no formal education in the sciences and thus possessed little understanding of the nuances and complexities specific to the infant body. Parents were also incapable and deficient, at least to some degree, in the formal knowledge necessary to prevent illness in their infant children, and thus should rely on the physician’s expertise regarding the care of the infant body.