Georgian Period Research Articles

Georgian Embroidery Patterns in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1819)

This article analyses the c. 650 needlework patterns issued in the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex between 1770 and 1819. The patterns were vital to the periodical’s appeal and materialised important aspects of its ethos. As individual objects, as a collection and as a part of the women’s magazine’s multi-media ecology, the embroidery designs have much to teach us. This substantial material archive provides a wealth of insights into domestic embroidery practice as well as into the fashions, seasonality, transmission, circulation and evolution of needlework designs and amateur embroiderers’ skills across the late Georgian period.

By Miranda, Mary Hamilton, Mrs Dickenson … Self-reference in Late Modern English private correspondence

This paper is set in the late Georgian period, when letter writing became a widespread social practice and letter-writing manuals established norms of propriety and elegance of style for addressing persons of all ranks. More specifically, it turns its attention to author-oriented address with a focus on the use of personal names in self-reference expressions, as these address the recipient of the letter at the same time as they describe the status of the writer. The aim is to explore their role as a means of socially-governed linguistic practice and as an index of politeness on the positive-negative continuum, as proposed for Early Modern English correspondence.
 The study is based on a set of private letters written by Mary Hamilton (1776–1814), a well-connected figure in royal, aristocratic and literary circles. The analysis traces intra-speaker variation in the use of self-reference in the main text and in the signature, and explores sociolinguistic factors (gender) as well as notions traditionally connected with pragmatic language use (distance, relative power). The research presented here will thus contribute to the growing body of literature that considers ego-documents as representations of the self, of particular interest in the fields of historical sociolinguistics and historical sociopragmatics.

The Post Office and the Making of North Britain, c. 1750–c. 1840

While the importance of closer, wider communications to Scotland and Scots adaptation to life within the Union, and the development of Britishness, has been commonly acknowledged, the role of the Post Office within these processes has never been systematically examined. This article charts the increasingly rapid development of postal services within Scotland and linking Scotland to London and the rest of England and Wales from the mid eighteenth century. It demonstrates the sheer extent and scope of growth of postal services in Scotland, and explores their use by different sections of Scottish society, by the mid nineteenth century. While commerce and manufacturing, as well as banking, together with the landed classes, account for the main sources of growth in use of the post, they were far from the sole beneficiaries of expanding, more efficient services. Scotland participated fully in the democratization of letter writing which was a feature of the Georgian period. The article then reflects on the consequences of these developments for the enfolding of Scotland within Britain and the rise of the latter as a salient framework within which people lived their lives. It underlines, in this context, the contemporary importance of letter writing and transmission of printed information to sustaining and forging connections and relationships between people and businesses, and overcoming frictions of distance within Britain.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848, by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt William Lee Hughes (bio) Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848, by Clare Pettitt; pp. xviii + 348. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, $94.00. Clare Pettitt’s Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 sets out to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for understanding how ordinary people, particularly the working poor, came to feel like agents of history. This project is the first in a planned series of three books, which draws upon print media studies, affect theory, and nineteenth-century historicism to argue that “seriality is the defining form of modernity” (2). It will be of great interest to scholars of the Victorian period, but it is particularly noteworthy for its closely- and well-researched chapters that cover the Regency and Georgian periods, which are too frequently ignored in nineteenth-century scholarship. The greatest strength of the book is its meticulous research of periodicals, including The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–49), Penny Magazine (1832–44), Olio; or, Museum of Entertainment (1828–33), Parterre (1834–6), Saturday Magazine (1832–44), Chambers’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832–54), Howitt’s Journal (1847–8), and Frederick Douglass’s North Star (1847–51). In chapter 1, “Yesterday’s News,” Pettitt argues that repressive taxes on print that were passed after Peterloo, especially the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act (one of the Six Acts), created a time-lag in the distribution of news, so that poorer people experienced print not in terms of the ephemera of an empty homogenous time of modernity, but rather as part of a multi-media culture. The repressive taxes encouraged poorer people to purchase chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, and almanacs instead of the costlier newspapers. These older forms of print media provided a different model of time and history, which overlapped with the newer models of time and history created by the daily newspaper. Pettitt shows that these serial rhythms did not synchronize until mid-century, after the repressive taxes had been repealed. Serial Forms opens new directions for the study of nineteenth-century periodicals by thinking of them as media rather than as literature. As media, these texts are not just texts. Rather, they are tools to be actively manipulated and engaged with in various ways that enable the reader or user to imagine themself as a historical agent and to feel like a part of history. Pettitt creates a cogent set of terms for analyzing and theorizing seriality in the period, particularly in her chapters on Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. While Scott is often read as the progenitor of the historical novel, Pettitt argues that his work is “unbound” by its close relationship to ballads, broadsides, and popular oral, material, and print culture (69). For Pettitt, it is best to “abandon the idea of the novel” to understand Scott’s work. Instead, Scott’s works are “print objects” (71). This term highlights the ways in which the illiterate and semi-literate engaged with print media through illustrations and as toys, for example. The chapter on Byron argues that his work is best understood in terms of serial performance (rather than as plays or poems) in an “immersive media revolution” (123). This performance creates a structure of feeling, “feeling at a distance,” which makes possible the extention of civic culture to the illiterate and semi-literate working poor (129). Readers will notice Pettitt’s engagement with critical theory and with affect theory in particular. Indeed, Serial Forms offers a refreshingly material engagement with affect studies. In Pettitt’s argument, the working class’s increasing access to serial print media renegotiates their place in history and enables them to feel and “imagine themselves into a historical [End Page 697] present” (250). The chapter on Mount Vesuvius argues that “emerging serial news media” created a shared sense of ordinary dailiness for a widening portion of the population (165). This sense of dailiness precipitated a feeling of living in a potentially historical moment in which an event could emerge. Without the feeling of ordinary dailiness, no true historical difference (event) could occur. The chapter on the biopolitics of seriality brings Pettitt’s...

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Diana Donald

Reviewed by: Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Diana Donald Juliana Adelman (bio) Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Diana Donald; pp. xiii + 282. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, £85.00, $130.00. Animals are now firmly ensconced in the narrative of the Victorian era, and Diana Donald's work is one reason for this. Donald's 2008 Picturing Animals in Britain remains key reading for scholars interested in the role of animals in society. Donald's most recent book, Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain, presents an interesting contrast to this previous work. On the cover of Picturing Animals is Edwin landseer's portrait of the lion tamer Isaac Van Amburgh reclining among his beasts, and most of the subsequent images feature men and animals. One exception is Joseph Wright's painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768). The image dramatically contrasts female and male responses to the experiment, which will kill the bird by depriving it of air. Women Against Cruelty picks up on exactly such tensions involving the gendered nature of animal welfare debates and the development of animal protection. In the introduction, Donald makes the point that, while campaigns against animal cruelty have been well studied, the focus of analysis has been on issues other than animal welfare, and has also ignored the importance of women's contributions. Donald provides a succinct and useful review of the advent of British animal protection laws and their relationship to other reforms, such as abolition. Chapter 1 draws attention to women of the late Georgian period who wrote against animal cruelty. This chapter sometimes reads like a catalog of works that have not been analyzed fully or brought to bear on a central argument. However, the chapter does make clear that, like their male counterparts, many female advocates for animal welfare were nonconforming in religion and sympathetic to abolition. Chapters 2 through 5 offer significant insights into both the importance of women to the animal welfare movement and gendered ideas about the treatment of animals and their role in society. Other authors (myself included) have acknowledged the gendered dimension to ideas about animals without deeply questioning its significance or its broader effects, including our unexamined acceptance of it as a byproduct of Victorian gender roles. Through her examination of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and its cognate organizations and publications, as well as the anti-vivisection movement, Donald places women at the center of a tumultuous century of changing ideas about animal-human relationships. Frances Power Cobbe, Angela Burdett-Coutts, and Anna Sewell are all familiar names to students of the animal welfare movement. Donald's contributions are to draw attention to lesser-known advocates and to delve more deeply into the particulars of [End Page 316] women's engagement in anti-cruelty. In chapter 2, for example, Donald shows that the early RSPCA was poorer and probably less powerful for its reluctance to accept women fully into its activities. That reluctance was based not only in a separate spheres mentality, but also in concern about how women's involvement might reduce the appeal of the society's message. By the mid-century, however, women's committees and women-led initiatives around humanity to animals began to proliferate and were generally supported by the RSPCA. Chapter 3 looks at the rise of some of these initiatives, such as providing drinking troughs for working and food animals and homes for lost or stray pets. To the frustration of people like Cobbe and Burdett-Coutts, women's committees within branches of the RSPCA remained separate and their activities constrained. Chapter 4 looks at the obstacles to humane education created by ideas of appropriate masculine and feminine behavior and modes of thinking. Activities like the Band of Mercy had difficulty attracting older boys because of entrenched ideals of gendered behavior. The great impact of Black Beauty (1877), as Donald sees it, was due in part to its ostensibly masculine style of writing. Sewell managed to break the mold of traditionally feminine writing about humanity to animals, thus ensuring...

The Rise of Victorian Caricature, by Ian Haywood

Reviewed by: The Rise of Victorian Caricature by Ian Haywood Dominic Janes (bio) The Rise of Victorian Caricature, by Ian Haywood; pp. vii + 296. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $79.99 ebook. Ian Haywood's The Rise of Victorian Caricature is a book that takes caricature seriously as having played a variety of important cultural and political roles in the 1830s. Historians have paid considerable attention to the lively parodic visual culture of the Georgian period but have tended to neglect what came after. In books such as Vic Gattrell's City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (2006), we learned that the personal was also political and that laughter was a way of critiquing power, not just a way of relaxing from the tensions of the day. The comparative insignificance of Victorian cartoons is that they, supposedly, were buried in more-or-less worthy periodicals such as Punch (1841–2002) and were designed to politely amuse the sedate reader. Whether that is an accurate assessment of the later Victorian period, however, is a question that this book does not address. What it does achieve is to highlight a wide range of little-read periodicals and sources for political radicalism in the aftermath of the Reform Act of 1832. These contained a huge number of images—the author estimates around 2,000—in publications which, in some cases, reached a substantial public. Figaro in London (1831–38), notably, reached an estimated circulation of around 70,000, thus outstripping other publications in the later 1830s. The book is, in effect, a follow-up to Haywood's Romanticism and Caricature (2013), which focused on close readings of a small number of images produced mainly by well-known artists such as James Gillray and George Cruikshank during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The figures who loom large in this new study, such as Charles Jameson Grant, are not just little known but often unknowable, since the facts of their lives have not been preserved. This is, however, a common problem for those who research the work of minor artists. The book works effectively within these evidential limitations as a useful compliment to Brian Maidment's works, such as Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (2013). That book did important work in drawing attention to the cultural and social worlds of visual satire during this period but notably, and perhaps regrettably, excluded the political realm. It is easy to see why art historians have paid little attention to the material explored in Haywood's volume since most of it is derivative and was often poorly executed, although he makes the point that the crudeness of the images was sometimes deliberate. In, for instance, The Two Mothers (1842), difference in execution was used to differentiate the worlds of the privileged from their social inferiors. Haywood's main concerns are not, however, art historical, since he views caricature primarily as source material for the [End Page 131] understanding of the history of radicalism. He persuasively argues for the importance of the periodicals of the late 1830s and early 1840s, asserting that the fact that they "have been all but erased from cultural memory is testimony to the success of Victorian newspaper historians who played down the importance and achievements of the radical-satirical press in their 'respectable' and gradualist narrative of cultural progress and enlightenment" (3). In his quest to correct this narrative, Haywood in turn effectively ignores Punch, which initially displayed some radical qualities that it was, admittedly quite swiftly, to lose. The result is that this book is not so much a full account of the rise of Victorian caricature as a discussion of its preconditions. Nonetheless, Victorianists will undoubtedly benefit from reading his account of the visual culture of Chartism. Haywood highlights the intriguing fact that what he terms the mainstream Chartist media was dominated by reliance on the use of text and apparent disdain for caricatures. The history of cartoons in periodicals was shaped by disdain coming from both sides of the political spectrum for the Bahktinian carnivalesque that caricature, unless constrained by conventions of politeness, threatened to evoke. The world that Haywood brings to...

The Georgian period of the filmmaker Otar Ioseliani

The creation of the film director Otar Ioseliani has a significant role in the evolution of Georgian cinematographic art. Since the 1950s, Ioseliani had been active in RSS Georgia, and since the 1980s, thanks to ideological circumstances, he continued his work as a filmmaker in France. Ioseliani imposed himself through a special style in the detection and cinematic expression of the negative parts of everyday life. That is why most of his films were not accepted by Soviet film critics, acclaiming them as negative works that did not fit the Soviet reality and lifestyle. Those works corresponded more to the conditions of critical realism than to socialist realism - the dogma of the totalitarian regime. As arguments for these ideas will serve the analysis (thematic, ideational background, cinematic expression, etc.) of Otar Ioseliani’s films from the Georgian period, starting with the bachelor’s thesis Watercolor (1958) and continuing with the films that became known to the general public: November, The Last Leaf, Pastoral, Once Upon a Time there was a Blackbird.

Georgian Washerwomen: tales of the tub from the long eighteenth century

AbstractWasherwomen in the Georgian period belonged, for the most part, to the small army of part-time and casual workers who found employment when and where they could. As handlers of one of the most coveted (as well as necessary) commodities of the period they were a focus of interest to a wide range of society and were growing in number as many householders came to rely less on resident domestic servants. Washerwomen were prime players in the ‘economy of makeshifts’, relying on a miscellany of supplementary activities to ‘get by’ and in which they showed both enterprise and agency.

The Church of England and the Coronation Rite, 1761–1838

AbstractBritish coronations from 1761 to 1838 have conventionally been dismissed as tawdry pageants with little religious significance. The study of these ceremonies has also been impeded by the dominance of historiographical frameworks characterizing the later Georgian period as an era of political secularization. Drawing upon many neglected sources, this article challenges such presuppositions by situating the Anglican clergy in the foreground of coronations and exploring the ways in which these events were perceived to retain a religious and political significance. The discussion encompasses theoretical understandings of coronations and the practical tensions between church and state exposed by them.

'The want of a proper Gardiner': late Georgian Scottish botanic gardeners as intermediaries of medical and scientific knowledge.

Often overlooked by historians, specialist gardeners with an expert understanding of both native and exotic plant material were central to the teaching and research activities of university botanic gardens. In this article various interrelationships in the late Georgian period will be examined: between the gardener, the garden, the botanic collection, the medical school and ways of knowing. Foregrounding gardeners' narratives will shed light on the ways in which botanic material was gathered and utilized for teaching and research purposes, particularly for medical students, as well as highlighting the importance of the garden as a repository of botanic material for the classroom. In this way, the blurred lines between art and science, skill and scholarly activity, and shared pedagogic practices between botany and anatomy will be revealed.

The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture. By Sally Holloway

This study by Sally Holloway is a fascinating insight into forms of courtship in Georgian culture and society. The book does important work in placing the moment of courtship back into studies of historical lifecycles. Holloway highlights the cultural forms courtship took for 60 couples from all sections of society, across the Georgian Period. Using a variety of manuscript, printed, cultural and legal and material sources the study reconstructs the rituals of courtship in cultural conception and practice. Chapter One explores formulaic “scripts” and the cultural tropes they contained from religious, physical and literary influences. Chapter Two looks at how these tropes were used in letters to navigate courtship and to create relationships. This chapter examines how letters tested out relationships and forms of gendered strategies. Chapter Three moves into the material world and further explores sensory interactions with love tokens. This chapter studies gendered and ritualized ways of using objects that created or enhanced feeling. Chapter Four looks at what was new in these objects: commercialisation and how packaging love changed the practices of romantic love. Chapter Five examines romantic breakdown and how troubled relationships were conceptualized using cultural influences such as tragic heroines and the cult of sensibility. This created gendered ideas in wider culture about such breakdowns. Chapter Six looks at legal consequences of such breakdowns, the social patterns in who was bringing suits and how women were more likely to win them. This chapter explicates how wider culture took on the image of woman as spurned lover and how courtship objects were key to securing victory in court.

The Sound of Debate in Georgian England: Auralising the House of Commons

AbstractSt Stephen's Chapel, Westminster became the first permanent home of the house of commons in 1548. The building had to be adapted to conform to its new use. Visual and architectural adaptations to the space have been discussed in detail, but the building's new role also required improvements to the working use of the space as a forum for public debate. In this essay, acoustic techniques are used to explore how speeches and debate would have sounded during the Georgian period and consider how St Stephen's was adapted for this new use. The results demonstrate that, despite these alterations, the 18th‐century house of commons was not ideally suited to speaking or listening to debate. The listening experience was not uniform across the chamber, and its former use as a medieval chapel may have influenced how well certain positions in the chamber would have experienced speech.

Shakespearean Henry Kemble creates a “row” on the Australian Colonial Stage, 1846–1859

ABSTRACTTheatre historians may be familiar with a nineteenth-century performer named Henry Kemble whose Shakespearean readings of the 1850s – “monopolylogues” – often feature as humorous footnotes in examinations of Shakespearean performance of the mid-nineteenth century. Less known is that intermingling of Kemble's Shakespearean performance with a growing public taste for riot and performances of rioting. I argue that Kemble’s Shakespearean monopolylogues provided settings for the performance of tamer approximations of social disorder characteristic of rioting in the Georgian period, specifically in relation to the British Riot Act of 1715. While the very nature of Kemble’s performances seem to suggest that deliberately creating a “row”, “uproar” or “set-to” was, by design, the principal feature of his presentations, his choice of Shakespeare as much as his mode of enactment shines new light on mid-nineteenth-century colonial definitions and management of riotous behaviour. Kemble’s press as a Shakespearean performer remains unmatched in its ability to illustrate not only the extent to which aggressive audience involvement was both tolerated and to some degree sanctioned within expressions of colonial law enforcement, but how conducive Kemble’s appearances were to a conspiratorial relationship between himself, his patrons and the colonial constabulary.

E.E. LANCERAY’S CREATIVE WORK IN THE GEORGIAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC (1920—1921)

The article covers the beginning of the Georgian period in the life of the famous artist Eugene E. Lanceray (1875—1946), an active participant of the exhibitions “World of Art”, an academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1912). His work is divided into three periods: the Petersburg manor one (including his studying in Paris and trips abroad, in Dagestan in 1912 and the Caucasian front of the First World War), the Caucasian one (after moving to Dage­stan in November 1917) and the Moscow one (after the final move to Moscow in 1934). The Caucasian period, full of works of different genres and techniques, remains the least studied, because in the Soviet times, for ideological reasons, many of its episodes were concealed. Thus, almost nothing was known about E.E. Lanceray’s trip to Baku in July 1919, about his work in the Propaganda Department under the Government of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia from September 1919, and his stay in Novorossiysk in January—March 1920. Many documents, letters, portraits were withdrawn from public collections after the repressions of the 1920s—1930s. The article shows the active cultural life of the artist before the Sovietization of Georgia in February 1921, which was not fully covered either in O.I. Podobedova’s basic monograph about the creative work of the master (1961), or in generalizing studies on the history of Georgian arts. The picture is restored taking into account E.E. Lanceray’s diary entries and correspondence, stored in different archives.

Remembering and Disremembering the Dead: Posthumous Punishment, Harm and Redemption over Time

This book is a multidisciplinary work that investigates the notion of posthumous harm over time. The question what is and when is death, affects how we understand the possibility of posthumous harm and redemption. Whilst it is impossible to hurt the dead, it is possible to harm the wishes, beliefs and memories of persons that once lived. In this way, this book highlights the vulnerability of the dead, and makes connections to a historical oeuvre, to add critical value to similar concepts in history that are overlooked by most philosophers. There is a long historical view of case studies that illustrate the conceptual character of posthumous punishment; that is, dissection and gibbetting of the criminal corpse after the Murder Act (1752), and those shot at dawn during the First World War. A long historical view is also taken of posthumous harm; that is, body-snatching in the late Georgian period, and organ-snatching at Alder Hey in the 1990s.

A Most Luxurious State: Men and Music in Jane Austen’s Novels

ABSTRACTIn Jane Austen’s novels, musicianship is mainly the preserve of the female sex. The main role of the true gentleman, as far as musicianship is concerned, is to be an appreciative listener. The mark of a hero is listening with enjoyment and attention to the woman who has attracted his interest. More than once, this is the shortest route to falling in love.In the late Georgian period, English masculinity was in crisis, as a result of various social and historical pressures, including the Enlightenment, the rise of the merchant classes, and the long-lasting European wars. Various models of masculinity were proposed by writers throughout the eighteenth century, in parallel with the models of femininity endorsed in the female conduct literature of the time. In this paper I explore the interplay of music and masculinity which resulted in the marginalisation of musical practice in the life of the English gentleman in the society of the time, and how that is reflected in Austen’s fiction.

"I Got the Horse Right Here": New Directions in Horseracing Scholarship

"I Got the Horse Right Here":New Directions in Horseracing Scholarship Katherine C. Mooney (bio) The story goes that the great sports reporter Grantland Rice, trying to describe the Kentucky Derby, asked his colleague, Kentuckian Irvin S. Cobb, for help. Cobb took a grandiloquent stab at it for several sentences but finally told him, "But what's the use? Until you … with your own eyes behold the Derby, you ain't never been nowhere and you ain't never seen nothing."1 Beneath the bombast lurked a notable acknowledgement between men paid to write on deadline that sometimes words just fail. They often fall short in description and analysis of sports, because, to be successful, that kind of writing has to do two very difficult jobs simultaneously. It has to efficiently provide an intricate set of specialized details to readers who may or may not have a great deal of background knowledge, details that are necessary because without them the events described lose their logic and significance. And it has to convey the pulse-pounding, breath-sucking awe of a great contest, using black and white marks on a stubbornly two-dimensional page. Accomplishing either one of these is a tall order. Trying to do both at the same time is a recipe for writerly frustration. It seems only fair to begin by saying that authors who write about Thoroughbred racing face a particularly tough version of this problem. Coming to grips with the arcane details of any sport [End Page 645] is daunting, but horseracing is particularly challenging for today's writers and scholars, in part because of the disparate levels of racing knowledge they can assume in their audiences. I was having lunch in the café at the United Kingdom's National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket last year when I overheard a man across the room strike up a conversation with the couple beside him. He was having coffee and waiting for his wife and parents, he explained, while they went through the museum. They were the real fans. "I don't really know anything," he shrugged. "Moore. McCoy. Frankie. That's it."2 His tone was the one an American would use to acknowledge that familiarity with Brady, Rodgers, and Manning doesn't mean knowing very much about football. British scholars can more reliably draw on a greater depth of common knowledge of racing, which may account for their denser scholarship on the topic in the last forty years.3 My discussion here will be weighted toward American texts, though even within that category the field's practitioners are significantly divided. Mike Huggins pointed out in 2009 that "academic study of horseracing is relatively young," which means in part that much of the research in the field has been conducted by non-professionals.4 Many of those authors have been both meticulous and knowledgeable and, on the whole, better than the professional historians at the dual challenges of writing about horseracing. So this survey includes many examples of their work, crucial for any scholar in the field. Popular authors have dominated a prevalent genre of writing about Thoroughbreds—books that chronicle the career of a particular horse. There have been almost as many of these books as there have [End Page 646] been racing champions. A few volumes aspire to take on decades of winners.5 But most confine themselves to a single animal, ranging from Eclipse, the undisputed king of British racing in the Georgian period, to American Pharoah, 2015's American Triple Crown champion.6 Some authors have expanded beyond a single horse to tell the story of events and places. James Nicholson, in The Kentucky Derby: How the Run for the Roses Became America's Premier Sporting Event, analyzes the Derby's powerful role in displaying and legitimizing inequalities of class and race, from the battles of Reconstruction to those of the twenty-first century.7 Other scholars, like Nancy Struna, have focused on the larger significance of historic match races, the head-to-head contests between handpicked stars of the track that fascinated Americans from the colonial period down to the time of the Foolish Pleasure–Ruffian race in 1975.8 Writers have...

Dating Phonological Change on the Basis of Eighteenth-Century British English Dictionaries and Orthoepic Treatises

Lexicographic evidence from eighteenth-century English orthoepists needs to be carefully interpreted to avoid misrepresentations of the actual pronunciation of English at that time. This is particularly true for unstressed syllables, which were subject to severe sociolinguistic pressures that stigmatized vowel weakening and promoted a pronunciation as close as possible to the spelling earlier stabilized by Johnson (1755). In order to overcome the difficulties specific to these prescriptive sources, this study relies on a fully computerized edition of Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), checked against the data of other pronouncing dictionaries of the Georgian period. The data shows that, in comparison to present-day English, the phenomenon of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables such as the endings -al, -age, -or, -er, and -ile was incomplete. The distribution of reduced and preserved vowels in a corpus including dictionaries and orthoepic treatises suggests that rhythmic stress, competing loanword integration processes, and word frequency associated with semantic change conditioned the spread of vowel weakening in British English at the time.

Frances Burney's Methods of Narrating the Court Experience

AbstractFrances Burney's journals were once read as realistic representations of life in the Georgian period, based on a censored and doctored text. The current edition of Court Journals prints many passages previously unavailable, and reveals that some of the journal entries were not kept daily but written up long afterwards. This paper explores the implications of these discoveries on our understanding of the text, examining the selection of material, restriction of focus, and self‐presentation that help Burney create her effects. As she practises her craft, she lays the groundwork for her most creative period of writing, following retirement from court.