Gentleman's Magazine Research Articles

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Poe in Cyberspace: The First Amendment, Antitrust Law, and an Internet Rhubarb

Poe in Cyberspace: The First Amendment, Antitrust Law, and an Internet Rhubarb

‘Handwriting is often the Index of the Mind’: Mapping Scientific Networks through the Collections of John Nichols and His Family of Printers, Antiquaries and Autograph Hunters

AbstractThe Nichols family was at the centre of an international network of intellectual exchange. As editors of the Gentleman's Magazine and as printers for learned societies, their printing shop was a clearing‐house for the scientific and antiquarian news that fed this scholarly community. Their archive charts the relationship between John Nichols and the botanists who contributed to his county history of Leicestershire, but it also formed the core of collections of autograph letters formed by his descendants. Now catalogued for the first time, these collections provide an insight into the friendships between antiquaries and scientists throughout the Age of Enlightenment.

Catesby's North American images in The Gentleman's Magazine 1751–1755

Catesby's North American images in <i>The Gentleman's Magazine</i> 1751–1755

Eliza Haywood's Captive Message

Eliza Haywood's Captive Message Catherine E. Ingrassia One of the most popular texts published by Eliza Haywood is one to which few scholars have attended. Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Return'd from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America, published in April 1743, was, according to her bibliographer Patrick Spedding, Haywood's "fastest selling work by far."1 By any metric Spedding uses, Memoirs was among the ten most popular texts Haywood published. In 1743 alone, five complete editions were printed in London, along with two Dublin editions and an abridgement in the Gentleman's Magazine. An Italian translation appeared in 1745. Certainly, as Orlando asserts, the text's popularity stemmed, in part, from "the subject matter" of this "fictional topical biography" of the nobleman James Annesley (1715–60), the Irish heir to the Barony of Altham.2 Kidnapped as a child by his uncle Richard (who wanted to claim the title himself), Annesley was sent to the American colonies as what Haywood—and other contemporaneous accounts—termed an "indentured Slave."3 After laboring for thirteen years in the American colonies, Annesley escaped and found passage to Jamaica, where he was discovered, identified, and rescued by Vice Admiral Edward Vernon (1684–1757). Upon his return, Annesley promptly initiated court proceedings to claim his title in a well-publicized trial that began on 11 November 1743. Haywood's Memoirs was one of more than sixty publications focused on Annesley that appeared between 1741 and 1745. Unquestionably, Haywood—who sold the book from her own shop at the Sign of Fame in Covent Garden—sought to capitalize on a narrative with immediate popular cultural currency. Perhaps because of Memoirs' apparent focus solely on the Annesley narrative, this publication has received little critical attention from Haywood scholars, who see it as a bit of an outlier in her oeuvre. Leah Orr, who has confirmed Haywood's authorship [End Page 67] of the text, observes that, as "one of the only works … which fictionalizes a popular news story," the narrative was "unusual for Haywood." It is, she suggests, "an odd choice of subject matter."4 I would assert that Memoirs is not "unusual" or an "odd" choice of subject matter for Haywood if we look closely at what the subject matter really is. I want to suggest in this essay that we must read her complex, popular, and under-discussed text in three distinct but interconnected ways. First, in the story of Annesley's quest to reclaim his title, Haywood addresses birthright, identity, and inheritance. These concerns might have been particularly familiar to Haywood, as Spedding notes, given the experience of her former associate Richard Savage (1697–1743). And, of course, narratives of mistaken male identity populate numerous mid-century novels; in fact, a section of Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle (1751) draws directly on the Annesley affair.5 In tackling the tale of a kidnapped heir—even a true story—Haywood was tapping into themes explored by contemporaries throughout the decade. Second, within Memoirs Haywood explores various forms of domestic or colonial captivity in which British subjects might find themselves. In detailing both the types of confinement Annesley experiences in England, including workhouses and orphanages, as well as the state of indentured servitude in colonial America (the title's "Thirteen Years Slavery"), Haywood creates a narrative of confinement and control that both fascinated and resonated with mid-century readers. The text offers great detail about "the Hardships of an American Slavery," which she characterizes as "infinitely more terrible" than "Turkish" or "West Indian."6 She reminds readers of a world of global captivity. Captivity remained in the consciousness of early modern Britons, suggests George Boulukos, in part because around them existed reminders of the various "ways in which Britons imagined that they themselves could become enslaved."7 After the Transportation Act of 1718, British subjects could be transported as a punishment for a crime (more than 50,000 convicts were sent from England to the colonies between 1718 and 1775) in an era when everything from vagrancy to petty theft could result in that draconian punishment.8 Further, during this period, nearly 200,000 English, Irish, and Scottish subjects entered into...

Gillian Williamson . British Masculinity in the “Gentleman's Magazine,” 1731 to 1815. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2016. Pp. 283. $100.00 (cloth).

Gillian Williamson . British Masculinity in the “Gentleman's Magazine,” 1731 to 1815. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2016. Pp. 283. $100.00 (cloth).

Introduction to Walt Whitman's "Life and Adventures of Jack Engle"

Nothing is ever really lost, or be lost.-Continuities (1888)In autumn of 1850, newspaper called The New-Yorker was set to debut in Manhattan.1 For six and one-fourth cents per week subscribers were offered latest news, plus a series of Nouvelettes or Stories, of highest merit, in advance of any other publication. Perhaps prematurely, it was promoted as the best Family Paper in Union.2 As literary daily, The New-Yorker was going to need steady stream of good fiction to maintain readership-and indeed, its editor, Carlos D. Stuart, received plenty of mail from writers offering stirring tales at modest prices. One author, novelist and short-story writer from Brooklyn, sent letter on October 10 volunteering particularly wide range of services. Did Stuart, he asks,have any sort of opening in your new enterprise, for services that I could render? I am out of regular employment, and fond of press-and, if you would be disposed to try it on, I should like to have an interview with you, for purposing of seeing whether we could agree to something. My ideas of salary are very moderate.Would you like Story, of some length for your paper?3After requesting reply through post office, fiction writer signs off: Yours, &c Walter Whitman.Though he rarely identified as an author of fiction, fact remains that by age of thirty, Whitman published popular novel and more than twenty well-received-and in some cases, widely republished-short stories and novellas.4 In their time, his tales appeared alongside Hawthorne's, Poe's, Cooper's, and Child's, in some of premier literary magazines in United States, including Democratic Review, Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, American Review, and Union Magazine. Counting reprints, Whitman's tales saw publication in more than two hundred periodicals across country. Even his temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842), an early effort he would later detest, sold 20,000 copies-making it bestselling literary creation of his lifetime.5 Whitman's years of engagement with fiction, and his popular and commercial successes as writer of stories, are enough to make one wonder, as Stephanie M. Blalock does, why and how Whitman left fiction writing to pursue poetry.6It is deceptively simple question. There is instinct to point to Leaves of Grass as full and final answer, to see it as creative work that could only have come from pencil of committed poet. By this logic, Whitman put away fiction because he had to. It is tempting to think so. Indeed, Whitman is now so deeply dyed in wool of American culture that it is difficult not to think so. How else to explain his shift from rather conventional newspaper poetry in 1840s, to revolutionary new prose-poetics, with free-verse effusions like Blood-Money (1850), Resurgemus (1850), and, eventually, Leaves of Grass (1855)? Surely something must have gotten left in dust, and critics from Edgar Lee Masters to Paul Zweig have long assumed that that something was Whitman's fiction. According to them, Whitman was no good at fiction-writing-or, at very least, it was insufficient for his expressive needs. After all, even poetry, Whitman writes, can merely hint, or remind, often very indirectly, or at distant removes. Aught of real perfection, or solution of any deep problem, or any completed statement of moral, true, beautiful, eludes greatest, deftest poet-flies away like an always uncaught bird.7 The fiction-writer, presumably, is left even more birdless.While tidy, such reasoning is prey to what Henri Bergson calls illusions of retrospective determinism, fallacy that because something happened, under circumstances it to happen.8 Further, it is simply too easy to underestimate breadth of Whitman's literary experimentation in fiction, and to downplay extent to which his fictions inform his poetic development. …

How Victorian Periodicals Mourn: Obituaries and Memorial Essays

How Victorian Periodicals Mourn:Obituaries and Memorial Essays April Patrick (bio) In an era when the reigning monarch mourned her husband for nearly forty years, the Victorian preoccupation with death appeared in artifacts ranging from mourning jewellery to post-mortem photography to black-bordered memorial cards. Just as these products for memorializing the dead varied widely, so did literary responses to death, which spanned genres and media. In the month following Charles Dickens's death, on 9 June 1870, written memorials for the beloved author, editor, and publisher filled the pages of magazines and newspapers. Barely twelve hours after Dickens's death, the Times published more than two thousand words on the deceased writer, as did other London daily newspapers, including the Pall Mall Gazette, the Morning Post, and the Standard. Many of the monthly publications printed lengthier responses to the loss in their July 1870 issues, including those by Dickens's friends and colleagues in Macmillan's Magazine, Temple Bar, Fraser's Magazine, New Monthly Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, and St. Paul's Magazine. Other periodical coverage of the author's death, including reports on the burial and speeches made about the deceased, is excluded here, as it performs a different function from the writings that memorialized Dickens. Additionally, many periodicals also included poetic responses to his death in such forms as the elegy. The obituary in the 10 June 1870 issue of the Times, "Death of Charles Dickens," includes details of Dickens's final illness and death before focusing mostly on his life, publications, and career. With two paragraphs near the end devoted to Dickens's oral readings of his popular works, the article quotes from "his parting speech on the occasion of his last reading at St. James's-hall" as the author's own farewell to his fans: "from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with one heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell" (12). It then concludes with a paragraph of reflection on what made Dickens such a popular writer before a final note on Dickens's father-in-law, "a musical writer of some eminence in his day" (12), a seemingly odd addition but one that supports the news-focused nature of the obituary, which reported any details available. [End Page 196] Many of the weekly papers could not print the news until the following week's issue, though the Examiner and London Review printed a short paragraph in the "Latest Intelligence" section of their 11 June 1870 issue announcing Dickens's death and promising "a detailed notice of the life and labours of the celebrated novelist . . . in our next week's issue" (377). The 18 June 1870 issue fulfills this promise, with a detailed account of Dickens's life and career referencing the same dates and publications as the Times and even quoting the same parting address from Dickens. The article concludes with a series of compliments on Dickens's personality and talents while maintaining a journalistic distance. In both this obituary and the one from the Times, any editorializing describes Dickens's popularity and skill as a writer and performer, hardly debatable or unique positions. In its 18 June 1870 issue, the Athenæum, another weekly paper, also publishes about Dickens's death but does so in a style that, on its surface, diverges from the obituaries discussed above in two ways: first, the page is surrounded by a thick black border, like a memorial card; and, second, it is signed by its author, Henry F. Chorley. Though he begins with a standard discussion of Dickens's works in chronological order, Chorley shifts the focus to acknowledge his personal relationship with the author and note how having "know[n] Charles Dickens in the intimacy of his own home" leads him to "such emotion as almost incapacitates the heart and hand" (804). Chorley continues, praising Dickens for personal attributes such as his friendliness, generosity, and dedication, with specific details that indicate his own observation of them, noting, "Dickens was incomparable" (804). A deep sense of grief pervades the entire article, with Chorley's feeling of loss most apparent in the final sentence: "On a future day, I may endeavour to fill...

Print Journalism and Benjamin Franklin's Scientific Politics

Eighteenth-century print journalism was a key source of new scientific findings. Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine, the case in point, offered the first articles related to Benjamin Franklin's electrical experiments in 1749, leading to Cave's publication in 1751 of Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America. By examining closely Franklin's journal and pamphlet contributions in the area of electricity and other scientific phenomena, we witness Franklin's efforts to foster political change by using his scientific fame. When he responded to Parliament's Iron Act (1750) with a new pamphlet, ‘Observations on the Increase of Mankind’, and then in 1769 published the pamphlet appended to new experiments, Franklin made clear his argument — presented in the court circles of Britain and France — that he wished European readers would consider his scientific writings as part of his argument for the political significance of North America, particularly regarding political self-determination. Franklin attempted to foster political change by using his scientific fame in Britain and then in France.

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1797-98: A Supplement to the Union List

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1797-98: A Supplement to the Union List

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1795-96: A Supplement to the Union List

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1795-96: A Supplement to the Union List

'Every body apprehended an earthquake': The Gentleman's Magazine's Reporting of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and Its Aftermath

'Every body apprehended an earthquake': The Gentleman's Magazine's Reporting of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and Its Aftermath

History of reconstructive rhinoplasty.

Amputation of the nose was practiced as a sign of humiliation to adulterers, thieves, and prisoners of war by certain ancient populations. To erase this disfigurement, numerous techniques were invented over the centuries. In India, where this injury was common, advancement cheek flaps were performed (around 600 BC). The forehead flap was introduced much later, probably around the 16th century. The Venetian adventurer Manuzzi, in writing a report about the Mughal Empire in the second half of the 17th century gave the description of the forehead rhinoplasty. Detailed information concerning the Indian forehead flap reached the Western world in 1794, thanks to a letter to the editor that appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine. From this episode, one can date the beginning of a widespread interest in rhinoplasty and in plastic surgery in general. In Europe, nasal reconstruction started in the 15th century in Sicily with the Brancas, initially with cheek flaps and then with arm flaps. At the beginning of the 16th century, rhinoplasty developed in Calabria (Southern Italy) with the Vianeos. In 1597, Gaspare Tagliacozzi, Professor of Surgery at Bologna, improved the arm flap technique and published a book entirely devoted to this art. He is considered the founder of plastic surgery.

“Rehearsing Continually the Part of the Past”: Lamb’s Elia Essays and the Classical Curriculum at Christ’s Hospital

IN ON FAMILIAR STYLE, WILLIAM HAZLITT COMPARES CHARLES LAMB'S Elia Essays in the London Magazine to Erasmus's Colloquies or a fine piece of modern Latin, linking the archaic diction and syntax of Lamb's persona to the Latin exercises taught in English grammar schools. (1) Hazlitt also associates Elia's style with the classically educated authors of the Renaissance like Sir Thomas Browne. Elia's classicism complements the subject matter of the essays because he celebrates defunct institutions like the South Sea House and memorializes the old familiar faces of his youth. Through this seemingly obsolete classical style, Lamb creates a magazine persona by repurposing his training from Hospital, the London charity grammar school that he attended from 1782 to 1789. In this essay, I argue that the classical rhetorical practices of Hospital are crucial to understanding Lamb's Elian performances. Elia is a sophisticated schoolboy declaimer who repurposes classical writing exercises, ceremonial school oratory, and a ludic counter-curriculum in his essays. As Elia, Lamb translates these older rhetorical practices to address the middleclass readers of the London Magazine and playfully challenge their values. This reuse of classical rhetoric ties the seemingly apolitical, whimsical Elia to a history of classical education and enables him to make literary interventions in contemporary political debates. Lamb, through his comic persona, transforms stale school rhetorics into fresh literary performances that demonstrate the importance of classical rhetoric as a strategic resource for Romantic authors. My reading of classical rhetoric in the Elia essays extends recent efforts to recover Lamb's participation in Romantic-era political and cultural debates. Since the 1970s, critics have historicized the ways Lamb ironiz[es] conventional responses for new ends. (2) Scholars like Gerald Monsman, Karen Fang, Felicity James, and Mark Parker have discussed the veiled political commentary of the Elia essays in the context of Lamb's participation in 1790s Dissenter circles, the London Magazine, and the East India Company. (3) Simon Hull most recently has illuminated the political dimensions of the Elia essays in the London Magazine. Expanding on Jeffrey Cox's Cockney School, Hull places Lamb at the head of a metropolitan group that includes Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and Hazlitt. This group, an 1820s counterpart to the Lake School, promotes an alternative model of Romantic authorship rooted in political engagement, periodicals, and urban sociability. (4) Yet despite the recent recovery of Lamb's work, few have discussed classical rhetoric in his performances as Elia. With the exception of Richard Clancey, who reads the essays alongside Horace's Epistles, most who discuss Lamb's education at Hospital focus on Lamb's Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago (LM, November 1820) and his non-Elia piece On Hospital and the Character of Hospital Boys (Gentleman's Magazine, June 1813). (5) They discuss the content of these essays, such as the class politics of the charity grammar school, rather than examine how this institution's practices are refracted in the rhetorical moves of Lamb's essays. While Lamb contributes to early-nineteenth-century debates about charity grammar schools, Hospital provides him with an impressive set of rhetorical tools with which to argue his stance, play with conventions, and establish his authorial position. By tracing how Lamb repurposes the rhetorical curriculum of Hospital, I suggest that he practices what Jerome Christensen calls hopeful anachronism, or the reuse of outdated practices in response to uncertainties regarding innovation, standardization, and competition. (6) Christensen argues that Romantic authors and contemporary literary scholars participate in the re-creation of the given in response to the cultural and political upheavals of their respective eras. …

Poetry Archives on the Web: Thomas Gray Archive, The Poetry of the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1800: An Electronic Database of Titles, Authors, and First Lines, and The Poetess Archive

Poetry Archives on the Web: Thomas Gray Archive, The Poetry of the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1800: An Electronic Database of Titles, Authors, and First Lines, and The Poetess Archive

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1793-94: A Supplement to the Union List

Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1793-94: A Supplement to the Union List

Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens by Nikki Hessell (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens by Nikki Hessell David E. Latané (bio) Nikki Hessell , Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. xxi + 195, $90/£55 cloth. Nikki Hessell's Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters takes a compelling look at an understudied aspect of four canonical writers' lives: the time they spent sitting in the gallery of the old Houses of Parliament taking down other men's words for newspapers and magazines. Hessell conducts a gentle but rigorous argument with the numerous biographers who treat this activity by waving a magic wand of prolepsis to show the coming glories of literary genius. While recognizing that ordinary reporters do not have books written about them, she nevertheless makes a strong case for looking at the four famous ones as "successful journalists, not frustrated novelists, poets and literary essayists" (xi). Aside from the welcome correction to the over-egging of the exceptional qualities of Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Dickens's parliamentary reports, readers of VPR will be happy that their fame has enabled Hessell's extended and careful analysis of how parliamentary reporters went about their business. In fact, she uses her subjects to trace the evolution of the craft via an "exercise in the recovery of evidence" that includes looking at the details of individual speeches of known reportage and then closely comparing reports from different sources along with notebooks, letters, and memoirs (xiii). The close reading of the evidence regarding more or less mundane reporting is excellent. The opening chapter, "Reporting and the Individual Talent," explores the sameness of biographical narratives about the reportorial interludes. It does not go without saying, but seems to go without questioning, that extraordinary men like Johnson, Coleridge, and Hazlitt must have been extraordinary or anomalous in some way as reporters. (Dickens is a different case, as he was viewed as a superior reporter before he was recognized as a literary figure.) Samuel Johnson, writing when reporters were banned from the gallery, is assumed to have exercised his genius most directly in inventing speeches that were better written than the originals. Hessell's discussion of Johnson's reporting shows, however, how the house style of the Gentleman's Magazine informs his practice, especially in relation to the Gentleman's direct competition with a different method in the London Magazine. Parliamentary reporting advanced considerably from Johnson's day to when Coleridge and Hazlitt briefly worked for the Morning Post and the Morning Chronicle. Coleridge was already noted as a writer of great promise when Daniel Stuart recruited him for the Morning Post, and Hessell argues that he assumed a hybrid role as gallery observer, reporter, and editor. Looking closely at the famous debate on peace (February 3, [End Page 429] 1800), Hessell cross-examines David Erdman's essay "Coleridge in Lilliput" (1960). In her treatment of Hazlitt, she takes on more recent critical treatments, notably by Duncan Wu, whose attribution of the entirety of the Marquis of Wellesley's speech (December 20, 1813) she disproves based on an analysis of reportorial procedures. Hessell replaces the "image of the critical Hazlitt, making judgments about the relative worth of speeches . . . with the image of a successful member of the Morning Chronicle's gallery corps" (126). Dickens's journalism has been receiving extra scrutiny lately, and his time in the gallery is no exception. Hessell draws on, rather than argues with, such works as John Drew's Dickens the Journalist (2005). The paradox of Dickens's reporting of speeches is that his celebrated facility with shorthand and reputation for accuracy has allowed his reports to become invisible. Hessell shows that Dickens "worked in a very specific moment in the history of parliamentary journalism," when shorthand accuracy and composition from memory and longhand notes existed side by side (166). By comparing the transcripts for three specific speeches that can probably be assigned to Dickens, Hessell proves that despite his reputation as a shorthand writer, Dickens also exercised the discretion and editing abilities that had long characterized the good reporter; he was "a much more complicated figure, an accurate reporter who would not have always produced accurate reports" (166). Hessell's...

Robert Southey's "Madoc" in America

The Madoc myth shows up in a range of late 18th century and early 19th century works on both sides of the Atlantic, from John Filson's Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentuckey (1784) in the United States to a 1791 series of essays in the British Gentleman's Magazine. Two of the best known British re-workings of myth were by the poet Edward Williams--known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg--and by Robert Sou they. During the mid-1790s, both Sou they and Iolo made plans to emigrate to western Pennsylvania, then the gateway to the American West, in order to escape the stilling politics of counter-revolutionary Britain. Both were deterred by financial difficulties, and their poetic adaptations of the Madoc myth perhaps allowed them to indulge imaginatively in risk-free vicarious migration. However, their adaptations of the myth were also politically charged commentaries on Anglo-Welsh relations and on British ongoing colonial projects in North America. Both poets employed the Madoc myth to represent the western frontier as a place where the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality might yet flourish. Yet their poems say more about the previous six centuries of English colonial government of than about the possibility of British settlement of the Ohio Valley. In his Address to the Inhabitants of Wales Iolo used the Madoc myth to imagine for the an American homeland that would free them from the economic and political discontents they experienced under British rule. Southey, as Caroline Franklin has shown, drew heavily on Iolo's knowledge of the myth for his epic poem Madoc (1795-1805). However, Madoc asserts the British right to the Ohio Valley by first affirming the justice of British colonial government of Wales. In employing the myth to claim the British continuing stake in the settlement of the Ohio Valley, Southey establishes a geographic and ideological equivalence between and the western frontier as primitive regions offering an escape from political oppression, but, somewhat paradoxically, only if they could first he brought under civilized colonial rule. In comparison to Ireland, Scotland, and England, contributed relatively few people and resources to the settlement of British North America. Some historians have questioned the existence of a distinctive diaspora, arguing that for intents and purposes 18th and early 19th century Welsh migration can be accounted part of the broader English movement (Horn 38). (1) Yet, the contribution to the Romantic-era lore of migration and settlement was disproportionately large. offered British migrants the legend of Prince Madoc, who, in the 12th century, left his home in war-torn and sailed to the Gulf of Mexico, where his people subdued, and in some tellings, mixed with, native tribes. The figure of Madoc has been traced to medieval poetry and he also shows up in late 16th century works describing Elizabethan explorations of the New World like Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations (1589). (2) The resurgence of the Madoc myth during the 1790s coincided with the increased emigration of artisans and farmers from into upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley, as the export of copper, brass, tinplate, and iron to British colonies disrupted traditional agricultural communities. The resurgence of the Madoc myth also coincided with the first major wave of westward migration from the eastern seaboard of the United States into the Ohio Valley. Accordingly, late 18th century versions of the myth located Madoc's descendants in what came to be called the mid-west, between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers, where all the rival imperialisms of the continent--American, British, Spanish, and the ghost of the French--were inexorably coming to a focus (Williams, 67). Frontiersmen claimed to have seen Madoc's descendants, often referred to as Indians because of their supposed mixture with native American tribes, in the regions that would become Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. …

Interiors and Interiorities: Architectural Understandings of the Mind in Hard Times

The Brain has Corridors—surpassing Material Place— –Emily Dickinson, poem 4071 In 1862, Dickinson wrote “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—,” from which the epigraph to this paper is drawn. T...

Identifying “Ninfield”: The Contributions of John Sharpe to the Gentleman's Magazine, 1795–98

Identifying “Ninfield”: The Contributions of John Sharpe to the Gentleman's Magazine, 1795–98