Georgian Era Research Articles

Russia as a Frontier of Europe in the British Educational Games of the Georgian Age

In the eighteenth century, an entertainment industry grew in England, including educational games such as playing cards, puzzles, and board games. The educational aspect implied that the game was not only a way of entertainment, but also a source of knowledge. The author examines the image of the Russian Empire shaped by British games of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He gives special attention to the problem of the player’s interaction with the game reality, analyses the implicit properties of geographical spaces, which manifest themselves when, depending on the characteristics of the “place”, the player is asked to perform a certain action. The author divides the games of the period under review into three types, namely card games, board games designed as geographical maps, and board games with an individual playing field and booklet. He concludes that, regardless of the game format, the traditional early modern division of Russia into Asian and European parts was reflected in its image in all the games under consideration. The European part of Russia, as a rule, was described in the same tones as other regions of Europe. Asian Russia could be endowed with a variety of qualities. In some games it could be described as inhabited by ignorant nomadic tribes of Tartaria, in others – as frosty and deserted Siberia. Sometimes these characteristics were combined, but it is clear that the fragmentation into the “European” and “Asian” worlds presented in British educational games influenced significantly the formation of identification patterns among British youth of the Georgian era.

Preface. Multisensuality in Historical and Cultural Contexts

This section contains four original articles addressing the matters of interaction, coexistence and representation of the human senses in various historical and cultural contexts. The multisensory experience of the world in relations to the past, the present and the future constitutes the main theme of the selected articles. The authors analyze how, in various cultural texts and historical moments, human experience was depicted through the prism of sensory perception, sometimes combined with sensory memory and the powerfulness/powerlessness of the (non)human corporeality. The authors analyze a variety of historical and cultural sources to answer the question of the impact of multisensory experience on our view of the world: in the past, the present and the future. Nina C. Rastinger in her article “Capturing Extraordinary Multisensory Experiences in Writing: Reports on Natural Disasters in an 18th Century Newspaper Corpus” deals with written representations of natural disasters, which constitute extraordinary multisensory experiences, in historical newspaper texts. Natalia Giza in her study “Multisensuality in the Satirical Prints of the Georgian Era in England” shows how sensory perception enhanced visual humor in the satirical prints of Georgian England, examining how English caricaturists used various sensory elements such as sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Jules Sebastian Skutta in his paper “Tactile Vision and Othering: Ethnographic Engagements and Racial Differentiations in 19th Century Travelogues” demonstrates on the basis of ethnographic travelogues from German East Africa and from the time of German colonial rule that the transmission, emergence, and dissemination of features of racial differentiation are based on the interplay of different sensory perceptions. Finally, Bartosz Mroczkowski, in the article entitled “Designing the Future Through Touch” focuses on the sense of touch in the process of designing the future. The aforementioned articles illustrate that multisensuality is a multidimensional concept that requires a thorough analysis from different academic perspectives and with the use of various methodological approaches.

Multisensuality in the Satirical Prints of the Georgian Era in England

The article discusses the concept of multisensuality in the satirical prints of the Georgian era in England, focusing on how the sensory perception enhances the visual humor. Drawing upon historical and cultural contexts, this study investigates how English caricaturists employed various sensory elements, such as sight, sound, smell, taste and touch to convey satire and provoke emotional responses among viewers. Ten satirical prints by five different authors were chosen for the analysis.

Neoclassicism with a British Accent: Edwardian and Georgian Reflections in Russian Architecture of the 1900s–1910s

The article is dedicated to one of the stylistic trends of architecture of the Russian Empire in the early decades of the 20th century, namely neoclassics. The repertoire of classical architecture as such is cosmopolitan, but the very idea of arousing the classics at the beginning of the last century, marked by the appearance of Art Nouveau and the beginnings of modernism, turned out to be equally close to Great Britain in the Edwardian era and Russia during the time of the last emperor. This unanimity in the rejection of stylistic innovations is interesting as a phenomenon and undoubtedly deserves special study. At this stage, it can be stated that in Russian neoclassicism there was also a place for Anglomania, which was expressed, however, not in formal echoes of the Edwardian style, but in an interest in the history of the British classical tradition (primarily, the architecture of the Georgian era). The Edwardian idea of reviving the noble style of the past was embodied in Russia both in direct appeals to the legacy of Charles Cameron, who, serving the order of Catherine the Great, was an agent of Georgian architecture, and in an appeal to English scholars, who provided rich material on ancient Roman archaeology. The English influence in Russian neoclassicism is traced in the article from the very beginning (i. e. the moment when the Mansion of the Racing Society in Moscow, considered the first building of this stylistic movement, was designed by Ivan Zholtovsky in 1903) through the programmatic “Cameron-style” architecture of the Prince Sergey Shcherbatov’s house in the same place, created by Alexander Tamanyan, to those “Georgian” apartments inside the Palace on the Moika river embankment that were designed by Andrey Beloborodov for Prince Felix Yusupov, one of the most famous Anglomaniacs of St. Petersburg. “Georgian” reflections are also found in the Moscow mansion of Gavriil Tarasov built by Zholtovsky. Its exterior contains some references not only to Palladio’s Palazzo Thiene (Vicenza), but also to London’s Burlington House designed by Colen Campbell. Thus, the British “accent” in Russian neoclassicism of the 1900s–1910s sounds no less obvious than the Italian one.

Stage, Street, Garden, or Parlour: The Ubiquitous Popular Songs of Late Georgian England

ABSTRACT This article explores the ubiquity of popular songs across print traditions, performance venues, and social classes in England during the late Georgian era. It examines the formatting and presentation of an eighteenth-century chapbook, contextualizing it within contemporaneous print cultures before exploring how the songs in this item of cheap literature relate to music from English comic operas, pleasure garden entertainments, and domestic spaces. Through this case study, the article aims to illuminate a compelling era of English song before the “elite” became exclusive of the “popular,” when songs moved fluidly between social contexts and print traditions and were heard, known, and performed by multiple classes of English society.

Strategies and tactics of the British parental discourse: historical perspective

This article studies verbal and non-verbal means of implementing parental discourse strategies and tactics used by representatives of the British linguistic and cultural community of the 18th and 21st centuries and establishes the changes they underwent in the speech of the father’s and the mother’s discursive personality. The research is substantiated by linguists’ growing interest in the ways communicative behaviour is formed, including its diachronic aspects. The research is aimed at establishing characteristic features of British parents and children’s communication basing on British fiction films, whose main characters are typical representatives of the Georgian era (the series “Aristocrats” and “Pride and Prejudice”) and the present (“Broadchurch”). The object of study is the strategies and tactics of the British parental discourse of the corresponding centuries, and the subject is verbal and/or non-verbal variants of their actualization. The study is based on the methods of discursive and contextual analysis, which allowed us to reveal the specifics of typical communicative strategies and tactics functioning in the British parental discourse, and comparative analysis, which contributed to identification of changes of strategies and tactics configuration in the speech of the father’s and the mother’s discursive personality of the 21st century compared to the speech of the father’s and the mother’s discursive personality of the 18th century. We claim that the speech of both the father’s and the mother’s discursive personality in both historical periods is dominated by cooperative strategies with a tendency to a moderate increase in the frequency of use, with the leading strategy for both historical periods being that of cooperation; the leading tactics vary – providing advice and instructions in the 18th century and discussion in the 21st century. Confrontation strategies do not significantly vary in terms of gender and chronological factors either: for both centuries under study, the conflict strategy is the leading one; the dominant tactics for the father’s discursive personality is order, for the mother’s discursive personality it is condemnation/reproach.

Women and the Construction Industry in Georgian Britain and Ireland

ABSTRACTWhile the role of women as designers and/or patrons of architecture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland is increasingly recognised, their role in the making of architecture remains contested. This article sheds light on the subject by drawing not just on the extensive secondary literature, but also on records of livery companies and other primary sources in London and Dublin. It begins with the building site, focusing on female apprenticeship. Here substantial evidence is provided showing that girls bound to bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers as apprentices — the so-called ’lost labourers’ of recent scholarship, recorded in guild registers and court minutes — did not in fact acquire craft skills or work as on-site operatives in those trades. The article then turns to those areas of the building process to which women did make a substantial contribution: first the practical realm, including brickmaking, lime-burning and the cleaning and preparation of carved and moulded work for painters and decorators; then the organisational realm of business, including property development, house-building and estate management. Taken together, these stories from the margins of architectural and labour histories make clear the distinction between competence in skills and competence in business, giving a more accurate picture of the multifarious nature of female participation in the construction industry in the Georgian era.

Theatrical Arbitration in Georgian England

ABSTRACT The connection between theatre and the law has been much explored, and especially the theatricality of the courtroom, which developed in the late Georgian era. This article seeks to look beyond the law to a wider culture of dispute settlement, of which legal proceedings were only a single subset, and in some ways a deeply unpopular one. The business of theatre provides a window onto this culture, not least because theatre proprietors were extremely disputatious, both due to their personality and for a range of structural and legal reasons, including the monopolistic regime of theatre patents. The resolution of disputes was often performative, requiring a repertoire including legal threats and suits, but mediation and arbitration might provide cheaper and quicker resolution, with less reputational damage. Indeed, arbitration was so familiar to theatre folk that it featured in plays, which explored its wider cultural meaning. Managing theatre arbitrations was also politically charged, because of the political language used, the involvement of the political and aristocratic elite, and the immediate need to resolve disputes with audiences and even pacify riots. This article thus seeks to affirm the importance of arbitration in the interconnected areas of Georgian theatre, law, business and politics.

Jane Austen: The Musician as Author

Jane Austen was a practising musician, and my intention in this paper is to investigate the significance of that fact for her writing practice. Beginning with the comparison between Elizabeth and Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, I will consider contemporary attitudes to virtuosity and aesthetics in an attempt to understand the implications in Austen’s fiction of the distinction between ‘playing well’ and ‘being listened to with pleasure’. My recently completed project of cataloguing in detail each piece of playable music in the Austen Family Music Books facilitates the study of Austen’s personal musical taste in the context of her extended family and, more broadly, of English musical culture in the late Georgian era. I attempt to bring together Austen the musician with Austen the writer, both in her knowledge of the musical repertoire of the time and the language of music more generally.

On British travelers in Albania from the Georgian era to Edwardian era: Studies and travelogue

This paper is a summary of the tradition of British travelers in Albania during the 19th century until the First World War. Referring to British history and British cultural traditions, these travelers are classified between two periods: from Georgian era to Edwardian era. British travelers began to visit Albania frequently, especially from the time of the rule of Ali Pasha Tepelena, through whose pasha’s territory traveled many British agents, missionaries, and adventurers, including the eminent poet Gordon Byron and his friend John C. Hobhouse, and Dr. Henry Holland. The first part of the paper deals with the main studies for travelogue literature, listing the authors and their studies according to the order and study approaches. As there are hundreds of books with travel notes from British travelers on Albania and Albanians, the second part of the article focuses only on some of the most famous British travelers, such as Edward Lear, Arthur Evans, Edith Durham, Henry N. Brailsford and Aubrey Herbert. The purpose of this paper is to make a chronological history of British travelers in Albania and historical literature on this literature genre of British travelers who traveled and describes Albania of late modernity.

HF02-02 THOMAS ROWLANDSON AND THE ENGLISH PENII

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 May 2022HF02-02 THOMAS ROWLANDSON AND THE ENGLISH PENII Michael Moran Michael MoranMichael Moran More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000002540.02AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) was one of England’s most recognizable caricaturists and is little appreciated in medicine. He is overshadowed perhaps historically by his rival William Hogarth (1697-1764) but he has a certain appeal to urology in his numerous depictions of British penii. The word penii is a British slang humorous reference to multiple penises. There exist multiple compendia of Rowlandson's artworks, commentaries and even a short biography. Almost none of his works though are quoted by medical historians. METHODS: A review of the literature of all aspects of the works of Thomas Rowlandson with special attention to his more obscure sexual images. We also paid significant attention to his depiction of medicine and surgery as well as anatomy of his time. The Wellcome Library in London as well as the British Museum also provided invaluable assistance in finding many more esoteric works by Rowlandson. RESULTS: Caricature is a satirical artform widely utilized since the Renaissance as a reflection upon the mores of society, in this instance, the Georgian era of England. Since this artform is a cross between art and humor they reflect intently some of the foibles and humorous thoughts of the times in which they were created and printed. There are always two sides to the caricature- the caricaturist and the subject. CONCLUSIONS: Rowlandson was a prolific Georgian artist whose life stretched across the loss of the American colonies by England, the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. He was singularly recognized in his own time by his “topical caricatures” and was collected by the Royal Family. He appears to have been fascinated by English sexual practice and portrayed the British penis avidly and often and deserves a resurrection of sorts, especially in sexual medicine and urology. Source of Funding: None © 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 207Issue Supplement 5May 2022Page: e206 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Michael Moran More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF DownloadLoading ...

Board Games in England of the Georgian Era as a Tool of Education, Upbringing and Distribution of Scientific Knowledge

Board Games in England of the Georgian Era as a Tool of Education, Upbringing and Distribution of Scientific Knowledge

In the Dog House: British Canines at Home, 1688–1832

Companion animals tangibly alter our experience of domestic spaces and influence our feelings about home. The Georgian era is well-established as a crucible of British domesticity, and animal historians identify the eighteenth-century as a pivotal moment in the development of ‘modern’ pet ownership. How did emotionally and physically intimate relationships between people and dogs affect their shared domestic spaces during this moment of flux? The experiences of dog owners and their acquaintances, as recorded in diaries and correspondence, testify to the ‘canification’ of the elite eighteenth-century home: people modified their homes to reflect their companions’ status within the household, just as dogs made their own mark on their home environment. The elevated position enjoyed by dogs in some Georgian homes is demonstrated by their ‘ownership’ of objects within the household, evidenced by wills, inventories, and canine material culture itself. However, this mode of dog ownership remained controversial and was frequently represented as emotionally and financially excessive. Critics targeted the elite dog’s privileged position within the home, finding their access to human objects and spaces indicative of their owners’ preference for canine company above their obligations to other humans — be they spouses, offspring or servants. Only by considering the eighteenth-century elite household as a multi-species domestic space and taking account of both human and non-human experiences of the home (and real or imagined representations of such experiences) can the development of British domesticity and, later, the formation of societally-approved ideals of pet ownership, be fully appreciated.

The rise of the civil engineering profession in Britain

In this paper, based on his James Sutherland History Lecture delivered to the Institution of Structural Engineers in 2020, Steven Brindle provides a brief history of civil engineering in Britain, charting its development from hydraulic projects and early attempts to apply intellect to structural design in the 17th century, through a great commercially driven boom in the Georgian era, to the foundations of the modern profession in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

‘Tumbling into the lap of Majesty’: Minuets at the Court of George III

AbstractPerformance and ritual were central to the functioning of royal courts in the Georgian era. Every year George III held court balls to mark the birthdays of the monarch and consort. The royal birthday ball opened with minuets, a dance that demonstrated grace, ease, politeness, gentility and education. The pressure to perform with grace and accomplishment was immense, as any missteps were eagerly commented on in the press and in correspondence. This article examines the ballroom as an intense emotional space for demonstrating membership of the bon ton.

Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era by Kimberly S. Alexander

Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era by Kimberly S. Alexander

‘Tales of Wonder and Horror’: Subject of Insanity in the Leeds Newspaper Press Miscellanies During the Late Georgian Era

This article explores the way in which leading Yorkshire newspapers, the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury, portrayed mental illness during the late Georgian era. In this period, newspapers were a central forum of public debate, yet a comprehensive analysis of the way they represented mental illness is lacking from the scholarship. Through the textual analysis of the newspaper miscellanies, this paper locates the subject of insanity within the middle-class Northern readership during the years of 1800 to 1840. The press content provides a fascinating glimpse of the opinions of the newly emerging psychiatric practitioners and the peculiarly middle-class fears and concerns about mental illness and its supposed increase.

The patterns of music subscription in English, Welsh and Irish cathedrals during the Georgian era

Abstract The quality of the music produced at Britain’s cathedrals during the 18th century has generally been accepted to have been poor, and there has been much written on the reluctance of deans and chapters to invest financially in the choirs. However, an analysis of the music purchased by such groups through subscription paints a very different picture, with some deans and chapters investing heavily in the acquisition of new music for their choir’s use. Ultimately, an analysis of the subscription lists attached to the collections of sacred music does not paint the full picture in regards to the state of sacred music at this time, but it nevertheless indicates that a more nuanced approach is necessary, with several cathedrals, particularly Durham, maintaining significant levels of investment for much of the 18th century.

Kimberly S. Alexander, Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era

Kimberly S. Alexander, <i>Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era</i>

Reading History in Britain and America, c.1750–c.1840

Throughout Reading History in Britain and America, c. 1750–c. 1840 Mark Towsey's fluency as a reader of marginalia is evident in his careful sifting of the traces left by readers of history books in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, including even juvenile insults bandied between users of the books. But this is more than a virtuoso demonstration of how to find and interpret evidence of reading. For Towsey shows how active readers applied their reading to the big issues of the day–including the threat of France, the relationship between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic church, the balance of power between Crown and Parliament, empire, colonialism, slavery and the American Revolution—and how they sometimes used these history books to mean the opposite of what the authors intended.Towsey's stated aim is to use the methods of the history of reading “to establish the wider social, cultural and political significance of history books and their reception in the period … to think about them … as everyday objects encountered and read by ordinary readers as they went about making sense of the world around them” (17). In this he succeeds admirably.His introduction establishes who the readers were (from all sections of society, although he focuses on the middle and upper classes), and where they encountered history books (rarely at school, apart from ancient history). His analysis builds on the ideas of Robert Darnton, Adrian Johns, D.F.Mckenzie, David McKitterick, Benedict Anderson, Stanley Fish, and Michel de Certeau (10–15, 20).Chapter 1 explains how and why history was read in the period, applying Leslie Howsam's “life cycle of the reader” (26–27) to show how readers took up history at an early age and continued to use it throughout their lives. Towsey's sources include notes, summaries, and excerpts made by scores of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, commonplace books, marginalia in library copies, and letters giving advice on reading or discussing what was read. Many readers kept their personal compilations of history reading all their lives, adding to them as their worldviews, and the world, changed.Chapter 2 focuses on two widely read but controversial histories, Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) and Hume's History of England (1754–61). Reviews in periodicals and other commentary framed both authors as religious skeptics, leading some readers to avoid certain passages, while others interpreted them in their own ways. Chapter 3 picks out the theme of constitutional history, showing how most readers clung to a Whig view of English political progress, rejecting Hume's more nuanced and less triumphalist interpretation. Chapter 4 examines how readers in different parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland read histories of the union and its constituent nations, particularly in Scotland (united with England in 1707) and Ireland (united with Britain in 1800). Towsey notes how an “emotional connection to place … palpably informed how many … readers of the Georgian era engaged with historical writing” (178).Chapters 5 and 6 “deal with the related themes of empire and revolution,” following American readers from colonial times through independence to the early republic and observing how they used histories written by British authors for entirely different purposes, such as William Robertson's History of the Reign of Charles V (1769), a sixteenth-century Spanish monarch, to justify their revolution against the British empire. Chapter 6 focuses on the reception of another book by Robertson, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients Had of India (1791), an Enlightenment history of the subcontinent, read eagerly by British soldiers and colonial employees of the East India Company. One reader, army officer Thomas Turner Roberts, made selective notes which changed Robertson's meaning, from praise for advanced Indian civilization to criticism of unchanging backwardness (230). Other readers filleted the book for handy tips on how to control the Indian population, while some back home in Britain used the same book to question the whole idea of empire. Throughout, Towsey skilfully balances “the idiosyncrasies of individual readers and … the interpretive constraints that acted upon them” through the intellectual and political climate of the times (21).This elegantly written book is hard to fault, although it has made me very self-conscious about my own note-taking. Towsey cites reviews and commentary from some London newspapers and periodicals, but I suspect that further studies of the history of history-reading will find a great deal more material in papers and magazines published outside London, including extracts, reviews, and readers' letters. But that is a different book. This one achieves what it sets out to do, establishing that readers were active and unpredictable agents in intellectual history.