Eighteenth-century Letters Research Articles

Christina Lupton. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century.

Christina Lupton. <i>Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

The Materiality of English Suicide Letters, c. 1700 – c. 1850

AbstractScholars have explored eighteenth-century suicide letters from a literary perspective, examining issues of performativity and reception. However, it is fruitful to see these letters as material as well as textual objects, which were utterly embedded in people's social lives. Using thirty manuscript letters, in conjunction with other sources, this article explores the contexts in which suicide letters were written and left for others. It looks at how authors used space and other materials to convey meaning, and argues that these letters were epistolary documents usually meant for specific, known persons, rather than the press. Generally written by members of the ‘lower orders’, these letters also provide insight into the emotional writing practices of the poor, and their experiences of emotional distress. Overall, this article proposes that these neglected documents should be used to investigate the emotional and material contexts for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suicide. It also argues that, at a time when the history of emotions has reached considerable prominence, historians must be more attentive to the experiences of the suicidal.

Abbreviations in eighteenth-century letters: Graphic clues and literacy degrees

This research object was the use of abbreviations in 18th century private letters written in Portuguese. In this context, the main hypothesis was that such resources may highlight the social aspects of the scribe of past periods, thus allowing their sociolinguistic characterization. To test it, we adopted the Language Variation and Change Theory (Labov, 1972) regarding the data selection, collection, and analysis. The corpus is composed of 24 private letters from the 18th century written in Portuguese Language of Brazil and European Portuguese by men and women of higher and lower social classes and are from two sources: (i) Fundo Barao de Camargos Collection, of the Historical Archive of the Museu of the Inconfidencia, and (ii) Post Scriptum Project: A Digital Archive of Ordinary Writing (Early Modern Portugal and Spain), of the Linguistics Center of the University of Lisbon. The results showed that (i) the external variables education level, socioeconomic status and gender and the internal variables typology and rule complexity interfered with the use of abbreviations; thus, (ii) the abbreviations translate linguistic and extralinguistic information about the one behind the quill and are a methodological tool for the characterization of the literacy degree of the scribe.

George Berkeley’s Tar-water Medicine

Abstract In his last major book, Siris (1744), the philosopher George Berkeley proposed tar-water as a universal medicine, suggesting that he had found a panacea. Shortly after its publication, Siris became immensely popular and tar-water spread all around Europe and even reached America. The aim of this article is to present Berkeley’s ideas about tar-water as a medicine with a particular focus on the origins of tar-water in Berkeley’s thinking and its alleged medical effects. Berkeley conceived of tar-water as at one end of a chain, with God at the other end. I reconstruct this chain, excluding from the examination the last parts, related to metaphysics and theology. Furthermore, relying on eighteenth-century letters, books and pamphlets, I briefly introduce the conditions leading Berkeley to start experimenting with tar-water as well as the context and the so called “pamphlet war” following the publication of Siris.

China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min

Reviewed by: China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min Eugenia Zuroski Eun Kyung Min, China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 288; 4 b/w illus. $99.99 cloth. Scholarship of the past two decades has firmly established the global quality of eighteenth-century British culture, political ambition, and self-definition. Eun Kyung Min's China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 reminds us that, in an age when British national identity was being reimagined in a global context, it was impossible to think geographically without simultaneously thinking temporally, and vice versa. Cultural difference marked the relationship not only between England and other nations, but also between England and its own past. While studies of orientalism have demonstrated how the West distinguishes itself by representing Eastern cultures as somehow of a "different time," Min's original study shows how English writers relied on the figure of China to conceive of their own time, and their relationship to it, as well as to place English literature as a tradition in historical perspective. The unconventional historical scope of Min's book aims to illuminate how modernity was conceived, prior to nineteenth-century British imperialism, as a quality of English writing. The "modern" is juxtaposed, in this context, against not the "primitive" but the "ancient." In contrast to the later imperial weaponization of the modern against the peoples Britain sought to colonize, the modernity championed [End Page 529] by its early eighteenth-century enthusiasts found itself pitted against the longstanding cultural standards of classical antiquity. Min wants us to understand that for most of the eighteenth century, while there was a broad and sustained concern with modernity in English letters, there was little consensus on how best to characterize the relationship of "modern" to "ancient," or of "modern" to "English." Nor was there any fixed notion of how being in time was supposed to feel from a modern perspective. Instead, we see various literary experiments engaged in quarrels over cultural value and how best to define it, and over historical time and how best to represent it. What the books shows is that, across different projects, genres, and positions within the debate, it was impossible to have these conversations without invoking a broader global context, and the figure of China in particular. China is written into the project of defining modern English literature through the foundational quarrel between William Temple and William Wotten in the 1690s over the relative merits of ancient versus modern accomplishments. On the side of the ancients, Temple proposed a broad perspective on world history as a "corrective to . . . modern hubris" (21), evoking the extreme antiquity of China to support this call for intellectual humility in the present. Wotton's response in favor of the moderns relied heavily on a condescending mockery of Temple's laudatory claims about China. In the eighteenth century, this quarrel persists but is reframed as one specifically between contemporary English writing and classical human-ism—China and other ancient civilizations beyond Greece and Rome are written out of the question of literary tradition from a British perspective. Yet, Min shows, that broader global historical context, signified so powerfully in the eighteenth-century European imagination by China, remains latent in the emergent category of "English literary modernity," an understanding of literature "imbued with a strong sense of its distance from the classical models, and burdened by a strong need to theorize its own historicity" (38). Ironically, it is Temple—the defender of the ancients—who, in Min's assessment, lays the groundwork for the eighteenth-century cultivation of a distinctly modern English literary tradition through "his interest in non-classical cultures, his theorization of alternative antiquities, [and] his ideas about English national character and the singularity of genius" (46). China, initiated into the "ancients versus moderns" quarrel as a representative of ancient greatness, comes to signify quite differently, helping to frame the capacity of modern English letters to reckon with plurality and cultural difference within its own history as well as in the wider world. The field of eighteenth-century letters this study presents is generically...

‘Our Looks, Two Looks’: Miniature Portraits in the Letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Abstract This article examines parallels between the exchange of miniature portraits in late eighteenth-century letters and the exchange of photographs and keepsakes in the twentieth-century correspondence of American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Drawing on theories of the miniature in Susan Stewart’s work, alongside art-historical and literary-critical accounts of the practice of exchanging miniature portraits in letters, the article builds on arguments that portraits go hand-in-hand with the genre of letter writing. I argue that previous criticism of the Bishop-Lowell correspondence has not yet adequately explored their epistolary discussion and exchange of visual materials. As in the case of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, for Bishop and Lowell, letter writing frequently involved a literal and metaphorical exchange of portraits. The article places particular photographs in their original context alongside letters, demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between images and text and the key role played by the visual in letter writing. It provides a fresh reading of Bishop’s and Lowell’s linked poems, ‘The Armadillo’ and ‘Skunk Hour’, arguing that these poems are a means of portrait-painting in relation to the other. The poems are examined alongside descriptions of an antique miniature cameo, sent by Lowell to Bishop as a companion to his poem, which functions as an ambivalently gendered portrait of Bishop. Finally, the poets’ interlocking memoirs, ‘91 Revere Street’ and ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy’, are analysed to show their origin in letters, and their shared preoccupation with portraiture, scale and framing.

Performative verbs in requests: evidence from eighteenth-century letters

En la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII el marcador de cortesía pray era el marcador pragmático más habitual en peticiones mientras que la nueva forma please empezaba a surgir. Pray era una forma gramaticalizada con origen en el performativo I pray you/thee, pero please tiene un origen sintáctico diferente. En el mismo periodo se utilizaban otras expresiones performativas, frecuentes sobre todo en cartas, con el mismo patrón sintáctico que (I) pray (you) y que también se usaban en directivos. Estas expresiones hacían uso de la gran variedad de verbos de petición disponibles en el periodo de inglés moderno tardío, como beg, beseech, desire, entreat y request. Este trabajo revisa el conjunto de expresiones performativas utilizadas como marcadores de cortesía en peticiones en el Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (1761-1790) para revisar su productividad y las funciones desempeñadas en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder. Sarah Tindal Kareem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp xiv+278.

<i>Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder</i>. Sarah Tindal Kareem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp xiv+278.

How One Spends a Useful Visit: The Letters of Friederica Göttlich Braun in the Eastern West Indies

ABSTRACT Bibiana Friederica Göttlich Braun (1725–1807) served as a Moravian missionary in the Eastern West Indies from 1769 to 1791. This article contains translations of three letters she produced during her service. She composed the first letter to John Ettwein, a church administrator in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, soon after she arrived on the island of St. Croix in 1769. She wrote the other two letters to her friend in Bethlehem, Anna Johanna Seidel, from the islands of St. Thomas (1772) and Antigua (1775). These later letters are rare examples of eighteenth-century letters written by a woman to another woman about her activities as a female missionary in the Caribbean. The collection of letters as a whole helps to inform our modern understanding of female contributions to the Moravian mission fields.

The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason

Reviewed by: The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason Kathryn R. King Laura E. Thomason. The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2014. Pp. ix + 205. $80. The critic who undertakes to write on the risks and dangers to women of marriage in the eighteenth century is challenged to cut a new path through trampled terrain. The topic obsessed men and women throughout the eighteenth century and has attracted near obsessive attention since Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977). Find her own way, however, Ms. Thomason does. She devotes a chapter each to six mostly upper-class women whom she dubs “marital revisionists”: Dorothy Osborne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Chapone, Mary Delany, Sarah Scott, and Eliza Haywood (the latter an odd figure in this company). She concentrates on rhetorical analysis of their correspondence (real-life and fictional) and favors texts more likely to be passed over elsewhere. We get a detailed treatment of Scott’s 1772 novel The Test of Filial Duty, for example, not Millenium Hall; Haywood’s late conduct manuals, not Betsy Thoughtless. This study, then, directs attention to relatively underdiscussed texts. Another merit is that it draws on the increasingly sophisticated understandings of the familiar letter as a genre (or almost-genre) developed by scholars in recent years in such works as Clare Brant’s Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006). Ms. Thomason is especially [End Page 96] attentive to the way letter-writing allowed for female verbal agency and self-fashioning. She takes as a starting point the notion that in a “letter a woman could not only create a specific version of herself but also dictate the terms of her relationship with her correspondent,” an approach especially productive with respect to the actual familiar letters written by Osborne, Montagu, Chapone, and Delany, and mimicked in Thomason’s analysis by professional writers, such as Scott and Haywood. Despite all the talk, then and now, about the oppressive centrality of marriage in women’s lives and the author’s own repeated insistence on women’s “near-mandatory participation in a restrictive marriage system,” it is wonderful to confront the actual variety of living arrangements devised by genteel women, sometimes within and sometimes on the outermost edges of matrimony. Matrimony in the eighteenth century emerges here as surprisingly plastic. Delany remarried for love at forty-three after an extended, self-chosen, and happy widowhood; Montagu contrived to enjoy an extended and apparently amicable long-distance marriage that accommodated her passion for travel and a bisexual Venetian object of desire; Osborne arguably took the lead in the epistolary courtship of her future husband, Sir William Temple; after the shadowy Mr. Haywood vanished, Eliza Haywood remained single by choice (or so we surmise) for the latter decades of her life, thriving as a professional writer who may have lived companionably with a male working partner. The possibilities for women to reinvent themselves and their matrimonial arrangements were greater than is sometimes imagined, at least for linguistically adept women comfortably positioned on the social scale. The study convincingly demonstrates that women drew on the rhetorical power of the familiar letter not only to reduce the risks of matrimonial entrapment but also, more intriguingly, to nudge their own conjugal relationships in the direction of what today we would call egalitarian friendships. Love and desire were considered highly suspect in the middle to upper reaches of social life, we are usefully reminded. Even women disinclined to model themselves on conduct-book ideals were skeptical of the power of love to bring happiness, never mind the tendency of the romances and novels that supposedly shaped their emotional lives. The new ideal among thoughtful women, in Ms. Thomason’s telling of the story, was something more complicated and elusive: marriage based not so much on love as on a cross-gender friendship that entailed rational companionship, shared interests, and, less persuasively, “gender equality.” The anachronism of a “fundamentally egalitarian” matrimonial union notwithstanding, the discussion certainly makes good on the claim that “the so-called rise of companionacy was not as smooth as scholars of...

Organic Tensions: Putting the Tracings Back on the Map in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson

This article argues that James Boswell’s attempt to stabilize a biographical representation of Samuel Johnson in the Life of Johnson was frustrated by Johnson’s resistance to the project, which Boswell wrote into the Life. Using the theoretical approaches of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the article examines how Boswell uses the conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing, paratextual arrangement, and intrusive commentary to confine and fix Johnson’s life in the biography. The rhizomatic intensity of Johnson’s life cannot be fully contained, and it destabilizes its own biographical representation with laughter: Bowell’s representation of Johnson is depicted laughing at the biographer and the biographer’s project, ultimately undermining the biographical stability Boswell seeks to impose.

‘P.S.’: THE DANGEROUS LOGIC OF THE POSTSCRIPT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

This article examines postscripts both as a feature of eighteenth-century letters and as a literary device. Although postscripts could be used for entirely banal purposes such as sending regards or expressing thanks for a gift, their fictional usage was governed by a more specialized set of conventions.. e main contention of this article is that the temporal lag between a letter and its postscript allowed novelists such as Richardson to explore new ways of manipulating narrative time. Henry Fielding's spoof novella Shamela, with its numerous postscripts, can be seen as an ironic reflection on that aspect of Richardson's novelistic practice.

The Vision of Piers Plowman, Said to be Wrote by Chaucer:

The Vision of Piers Plowman, Said to be Wrote by Chaucer:

A Description of Reading Shakespeare's Early Modern Readers, a Digital Database

Reading Shakespeare's Early Modern Readers, directed and co-edited by Jean-Christophe Mayer and co-edited by Margaret Vasileiou, is an online database focusing on early modern and eighteenth-century readers' responses to Shakespeare. Sponsored by L'Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Age Classique et les Lumieres (IRCL) at the Universite Paul-Valery in Montpellier, France, it documents manuscript inscriptions found in early modern editions of Shakespeare's poetry and plays, as well as early modern and eighteenth-century manuscript miscellanies, letters, and commonplace books in which inscribers have excerpted from or commented on Shakespeare and his works. This fully searchable database aims to promote research about early modern and eighteenth-century readers' responses to Shakespeare, as well as to provide researchers of Shakespeare, early modern books and manuscripts, history, and cultural studies with easily accessible evidence of early modern readers' reactions to, and appropriations of, Shakespeare.Each database entry consists of one book or manuscript, and provides users with transcriptions and descriptions of excerpts, annotations, and other inscriptions; links to images of relevant pages; information, when available, about the inscriber(s); and bibliographies for further research, many with direct links to resources. Entries begin with, among other information, the author and title of the manuscript or book, the date of publication (when applicable), the approximate dates of the inscriptions it contains and, when necessary or helpful, a brief introduction that offers information about the book 's history, its inscriber(s), or its contents. Descriptions and transcriptions of inscriptions, as well as links to images of the pages, are presented in an easy-to-read table format, allowing users to scan each book or manuscript quickly for inscriptions of interest and, when possible, to view those inscriptions in a digital image. Following the table, the editors offer brief commentary on the inscriptions, clarifying or expanding on, among other elements, the content of the book or manuscript, the identity of the inscriber(s), the response to Shakespeare evinced by the inscription(s), or the approximate dates of inscription.As of the publication of this notice, the editors have viewed and selected for inclusion in the database more than one hundred books and manuscripts, all found in either the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the United States Library of Congress, the National Library of Scotland, or the University of Edinburgh Library. Each database entry includes the shelfmark for the book and a link either to the relevant library website or, when possible, to the book 's listing in the library's online catalog.Together, these entries paint a broad picture of the editorial, personal, aesthetic, moral, and even political nuances of early modern and eighteenth-century readers' and theater-goers' reactions to Shakespeare. …

“The reviewers reviewed”: Criticism in Eighteenth-Century Letters to the Editor

To the editor of The London Magazine:Sir, Finding you appropriate a part of your publication to criticism on the Monthly Review, I take the liberty to send you my thoughts concerning it. That the work has had some share of reputation, is certain; but that it loses it daily, is no less so [...]. I am of opinion, Mr. Editor, that although the proprietor might formerly employ two or three fanatical persons in the manufacture of it, he may have found it necessary to dismiss those journeymen, and ...

Enlightened sentiments: judgment and autonomy in the age of sensibility

Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the Enlightenment's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as sentimentalism. Nazar argues that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic judgment, and underrates its contributions to the key Enlightenment norm of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, she contends that sentimental judgment complicates received understandings of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability, and as such, implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.

From adverb to conjunction and back

In late Middle Dutch, the temporal adverb dan “then” grammaticalized into an adversative coordinator (“but”), which remained in use up to the nineteenth century. This paper investigates how adversative dan can be deduced from earlier usages and why it later disappeared. The paper’s first part discusses how temporal dan developed an exclusive function (“except”), from which the adversative use is derived. Semantic maps are used to represent the development, and to make clear similarities and differences with German and English cognates of dan (dann/denn and than/then respectively). The second part reports corpus studies of seventeenth and eighteenth-century letters and diaries, showing text type and frequency effects on the use of adversative dan, which led to its disappearance. This will be interpreted as a peculiar case of degrammaticalization, lacking semantic enrichment and syntactic flexibilization which normally accompany degrammaticalization. The case of dan suggests that text type and frequency are important factors in (de)grammaticalization.

De reductievocaal in zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse sailing letters - Onzichtbare spelling, dubbele spelling en palatale uitspraak

In this article, we examine two ways of spelling the reduced vowel in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters and their possible link with its palatal pronunciation proposed by Caron. Contrary to claims made by Gaspar (2007), we show that the so-called invisible spelling should not always be straightforwardly interpreted as a reflection of a palatal sound. In the case of the double spelling an analysis of our sailing letters corpus leads to a hypothesis about the regional distribution of this phenomenon and reveals a possible connection with the German or Scandinavian background of particular scribes.

Towards an Epistolary Discourse: Receiving the Eighteenth‐Century Letter

AbstractThis article suggests the significance of letters as texts in the long 18th century. It provides a survey of past and present critical approaches to letters in the period, and outlines the various ways in which scholars use letters in their research. The article argues against the tendency to conceive of the letter as a distinct literary genre, and rather suggests that scholars should think in terms of a broader epistolary discourse.

Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 by Eve Tavor Bannet; and Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture by Clare Brant

Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 by Eve Tavor Bannet; and Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture by Clare Brant